roll call

briefly

roll call

to explain grace requires

a curious hand.

                                                Marianne Moore

                                                the Pangolin

These days and days we’ve stayed

in place and yet stray

from the grace of immaculate spaces, 

the dogged way of tracing

the abeyance of dates,
their traceable

fingerprint places: how their being
there is a shape how their not

being 

there is 

a 

shape: how

they have names how

they have places how

they have cravings how

they have made ways of how to be

named aloud and not dismissed

because listen, when you call them
out  they’ll stray back into their throat.  
Like ticking the roll with your mechanical

pencil, quick check quick capital
A into the string of teeny
squares that for now will run
the full twelve weeks

blank and clean to the coming end:

weeks and weeks and in my tired

dated way, a paper layout

to make it all keep up and in place

keep it easy,

keep it being

keep it needing to be

seen. Take heed:

lean like you used to

lean, each of you: how you

listened, remember listening?

to the whole

goddamn list predicting (not

really) it

your name

what pen or sketch of serial

will has nested there

between two others (unless

you’re first unless you’re

last)

and you wait it out until it arrives

like every soothing routine

it arrives somehow

in time.  But now.  See? see?

see that Friday doesn’t need me

to say it’s Friday

to be Friday.  It’s all honest

and arbitrary but for the pure

dependence of it, the box

on the calendar

and what’s inside

to tell us

where and what we need to

see and be and re-

member              .

before it’s all thrown off its delicate

metronome in the midst of a plague

in the midst of a quarantine.  Tomorrow

the calendar says

I’ll be fifty.  Today it says

I’m forty-

nine.  I’m counting.  I have been

counting.  I’m right

where I belong, pausing all

that stalled indulgence like when,

when, when will the delivery come,

when will I hold it out and not

open it and not put it on the table

or the vanity or the porch rail if

the sun’s out

and watch for the weather to turn

watch for the afternoon to come on, watch it

March watch its sun come closing in later

(incrementally) than it did yesterday.  Or like phases

of the moon.  or illnesses.  But truly, whose

looking?

Before I reach for my darling

knife to open this gift (not the sun and not the moon

but if I could, now’s the time

wouldn’t you say?) I think of slitting

the edges on the ends first

and do, to ease the middle forward

and toward my rib and count

the seconds it will take to make it

finally

after all this gone by time,

see the light I have to light

if my fire's bright and not all that guardedly

or needing to be seeing

as what’s being

lifted or

poured or

tumbled . . .it’s been

a long, long time coming  up

or down or staying the same

marked or not marked Friday come Monday

or whatever day makes me

say today today

today is the day the last

day in this day and age that I’ll be this age

and I take it out for a walk

like it was a dog wanting

green grass or wanting

another dog’s pee tree

or even sweeter

like it was not any one day at all

you feel me? and being

such creatures who move as clumsily

or as gracefully as Marianne

Moore’s pangolin, depending

on how it needs to utilize

its armor

or its tongue

or its teeny eyes

or its absolute

vulnerability . . .tell me who?

you? needs

names for days of the week to be

boxed and shipped off

to the roll call to be stuffed

by incurious and injurious hands

so that by the time we arrives to be

opened we're all in shards or sand

or chunks some as big as my hand

some ground down to powder

some just relieved of its one small handle

now in three pieces

now resting in the bottom

of the vessel it was meant to be held,

light of the world it is, up with.