"Marking Time" by Christopher Gilbert (audio)

[0:01]Marking Time by Christopher Gilbert, 1983. Jogging out in the morning against the few high clouds, the blue sky is a memory like a sheer silk fabric held so far back I can't see through it— when I breathe the new air my body is young all over, a smell reminds how the two pear trees are white again, their flowers ephemeral as the words I recite to pass time in repetitious wheezed breath. Squirrels, blue jays, downed trees for markers to say how far I've gone, to be used in their brief names to crowd my mind with anything I can count on. Today as I struggle against the wind up the hill I watch a small butterfly wavering with spread wings, and remember dreaming of my sister who called last night when I was sleeping, and how twenty years ago she gave me from the held darkness of her brown palms a black butterfly with yellow specks. What it was she said is immaterial, there is the gesture though, and watching a bird overhead fly past the disk of sun, there is a flaring shadow fanned down from above that flickers like a rustled page with a poem on it; it is that quick flute darkness of a sister's voice a brother will hear in his heart when he's breathing deep enough.