Time Song

*

I was talking with a friend who said, quoting someone—I don’t remember who, a poet maybe—“There is no future in my joy.” We were talking about depression and the state of the world, its fate, and I thought my friend had missed the point of the line about the future and joy, but the conversation went on and I lost the thread.

*

The conversation went on and I lost the thread. We were eating strawberries I thought. I thought it was summer, June, when every day I gather a quart or two from the garden. But actually it was winter, layered in white, months had passed, or years. I knew nothing. The berries we ate were fresh from the vine. The cat was with me, eating. Nothing made sense in that moment. A cardinal ate beauty berries and fat squirrels squealed in the snow. The sun hit me in the eye. I was old. As if I’m not old now.

*

As if I’m not old now, she said. You’re not, said the other, her daughter, who always seemed older, the mother, almost sisters at first and later the mother, the one who made the rules, all daughters rulers in the end, as she had been the ruler to her own mother, in her own sensible prime, her mother past it, lost. There was no future in her joy. The future is joyless, it’s futureless, the mother said when she was waiting for death. She saw joy only in the present, not in the waiting, but in the now of not dying yet. The world was like that, she said, and it still is. Come on. Let’s go walk on the water. But the daughter overruled, We can’t walk on the water, Mother, she said.

*

We can’t walk on water, Mother, she said. Along the water, the mother said. You know what I mean. Take a stroll. But the child balked. She wanted to play with her guys, her animals and people, dolls, characters, creatures in worlds of her own invention. She never wants to go anywhere, the mother complained, as her own mother’s father had complained of his daughter so many years before.

*

She never wants to go anywhere. Wants to sit where she is forever and watch the movement of time, the rise and fall of the river, the rain, the wind, snow, sun, darkness, light, moon, stars, famine, flood, and strawberries growing, the arc of the universe a rainbow, as if tending toward pots of gold.

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