Time is a Mother

by Ocean Vuong

How else do we return to ourselves but to fold

What we’ll always have is something we lost

The sadness in him ends in me tonight.

It ends tonight! I shouted to the cop who pulled us over for dreaming. I’m not high, officer, I just don’t believe in time.

Maybe he saw that a small thing moving through a large thing is more like a bird in a cage than a word in the mouth.

I’m not sad, he told me once, laughing, I’m just always here.

Because my uncle decided to leave this world, intact. Because taking a piece of my friend away from him made him more whole.

& we hugged for the first time in decades. It was perfect & wrong, like money on fire.

So hello, hi, the blood inside my hands is now inside the world.

Sometimes I think gravity was like: To be brutally honest . . . & then never stopped talking. I guess what I mean is that I ate the apple not because the man lied when he said I was born of his rib but that I wanted to fill myself with its hunger for the ground, where the bones of my people still dream of me.

I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard.

It’s true I’m not a writer but a faucet underwater. When the flood comes I’ll raise my hand so they know who to shoot.

My favorite kind of darkness is the one inside us,

I want to tell him. &: I like the way your apron makes it look like you’re ready for war. I too am ready for war.

Maybe, like you, I was one of those people who loves the world most when I’m rock-bottom in my fast car going nowhere.

I made it out by the skin of my griefs.

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

Time is a mother.

The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow, more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting. Like him, I caved.

I caved and decided it will be joy from now on.

I used to cry in a genre no one read.

There is sunlight here, golden enough to take to the bank.