Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

how come the past tense is always longer? Is the memory of a song the shadow of a sound or is that too much?

The dog stepped out, sniffed my old man, still warm, then ran into the trees, into her second future. I walked from the wreck till the yards became years, the dirt road a city, until my face became this face & the rain washed the gasoline clean from my fingers.

saw in us a failed attempt at heaven. Didn’t know my eyes had three shades of white but only one image of my mother. She’s standing under an ancient redwood, sad that her time on earth is all she owns.

maybe we can cease without dying fuck without tears falling

Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an “artsy vibe,” a young woman said, sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to write about war and stuff. I’m just white. [Pause] I got nothing. [Laughter, glasses clinking]

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold.

What if it wasn’t the crash that made us, but the debris?

Time is a motherfucker, I said to the gravestones, alive, absurd.

But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive.

Because this body is my last address.

How faithful the memory of a shadow, you think. How you can almost see the author of its curve.

You are standing in the minefield again. Someone who is dead now told you it is where you will learn to dance.

You can be nothing & still breathing. Believe me.

Rain: to give something a name just to watch it fall.

Ben said you can do anything in a poem so I stepped right out of it into this one to be entered is to be redefined the bullet achieves its name by pushing flesh into flesh I was struck by these words we say I was caught by this passage it moved right through opened me up

I remembered my life the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree.