The Pendulum and its Shortcomings
by E. Kristin Anderson
This woman’s age spots tread
her fleshy cheeks, each one as brown
as she is tired, swaying with the train.
We come to pause on the bridge;
outside the ocean laps the rocks
at Red Hook, its genius not unlike
the ants in the road, in the trees,
my mother’s kitchen, which reportedly
never sleep.
You and I measure time
as if it is palpable, as if those crabs
I collected on the beach as a child, placed
in a bucket, and took home deduced
that their scratchings at a stainless-steel sink
was the beginning or the end.
We whisper come November,
come November: it is never
and it is always. Crab apples speckle
my grandfather’s lawn, my snoring cats
wake each other in the night. I push back
my cuticles.
The train jolts forward and stale coffee
teeters at the woman’s lips. She imagines
Nova Scotia just as I imagine you:
a weekend snowfall, or
flowers blooming roadside
in the gully, despite highway patrons
and their garbage thrown out the window.
