The poems—Thomas and Housman and Neruda—
lapsed into tourism when I first saw you,
as tall and foreign as the name,
on Ruttenscheider Strase.
Imagine impossibilities,
convicts of the imagination—
the statue of a sneeze,
a hiccup, a fall, a word escaped,
the mind unable to hold it back,
like the earth pulls back the grass.
Fleeting, floating, like a yawn.
Your life, only as long as a clap,
in a world where everything’s long,
as long as struggle.
The mumble of shy pink,
the loyalty of softness,
of petals pretending to be strong,
as strong as a vow.
The hamlet of pale flags,
the glance of toothy flowers.
A collective of spring winks.
I remember the voltage—
the lifespan of a blink.
But that is not what I saw.
When I saw you, I saw Time.
Time, our primitive invention.
I’d been counting wrong all my life.
You stood there,
Time bruising your flowers.
You stood there,
keeping time in colour, like aging hair.
I still remember you ten years later,
standing, flickering like impulse,
breathing brevity, skeletons of coral air.
Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree (2017), Missing: A Novel (2018), Out of Syllabus: Poems (2019), My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (2019), and V.I.P.—Very Important Plant (2022). She teaches at Ashoka University in Haryana, India.