Tuesday Poem

Tomorrow, my grandfather would say when I asked
him to ride my bike. Next day, I’d ask again: You said
you’d ride my bike today. No, he’d say, I said tomorrow.

This would go on for days. In Italian the idea of the future
is contained in the present: I ride your bike is the same as I will ride
your bike tomorrow and I am riding your bike right now.

What a slippery world. Che sarà, sarà!
Each time my mother reaches for a word—toothpaste, candle—
each time I forget a noun, I see that rickety old train of thought,

late again, sluggish, chugging around its _______.
Nouns are the first to go, the doctor says to the grandmother
in the sad Korean movie whose title, I remember, is Poetry. And the last?

When did articles start saying things like “a 6-minute read”?
You have 140 minutes left of this book, it says on my iPad screen.
And if I put the iBook down, for, say, two weeks?

That’s a way to stretch a minute! This is the 20th century,
my mother exclaimed the other night. Time is running out
to save the Western Bumblebee I learn today at 10:49.

A short text. A 30-second plea. I’m asked to rush my 27 dollars.
Immediately. I’m late. Here at my desk how is it possible
I’m also looking up into the window of my  father’s hospital room,

four years ago, watching him wave. He’s just taught me to play solitaire.
How is it possible I’ve seen only one sunrise in my life?
Did you know that “memory” has the same root as “mourn”?

An ounce of cocaine, the painter says, costs about sixty times more
than an ounce of oil paint, but lasts only an hour, while cadmium red
lasts hundreds of years. Well, time is money, as my grandfather,

who had neither, would say. Out of joint. Looping around.
How can you finish knitting an infinity scarf?
Row row row, merrily merrily merrily, row merrily row.

A vicious cycle. A brief candle. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
You have 140 minutes left.
Why do we say someone who’s dead is late?