Still Life with Yesterday

I collect time—
Sheets of paper made of time and sky and words.

The sky is made of the dead.
How there are no dead all time being simultaneous.

We are living and dead and words are ephemeral.
Paper is made of albino crows that fly away to dust.

My grandmother is dust.
Time moves as wings move as wind moves.

Wind rustles the pages of books.
Wind borrows the voice of cedar boughs.

Words cannot speak for themselves.
Cedar smells like joy.

How the sky is the convex surface of a river called earth.
How the earth is a speck of dust in the cosmos.

Time is the smell of popcorn and wet dog.
Time is the smell of coffee and sea spray.

Joy is the earth itself.
From up in the sky my grandmother sings.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred forty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her newest collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024). Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.