Time

Now time goes away like sugar

dissolved but still sweet, wafting

through the smell of burning leaves,

root beer floats, plastic dolls.

Hear the soft scrape of a snow shovel

or a rake, our songs in the back seat of a car,

my mother's voice at the piano,

the baby crying in a wooden-slatted crib.

Clusters of bicycles looped in tissue paper

decorate a neighborhood,

little legs pumping months after the snowman

in daddy's hat melted in the front yard.

Toads in shoe boxes, fireflies in jars,

water in a plastic pool soaking up the sun's warmth.

Children waiting through an unending,

capricious summer day.

Feel the quietude of a Sunday morning,

sense the sparseness of each new day.

Nothing happened today, but yesterday the milkman

and the crazy-haired egg lady delivered their goods.

Lying in a pile of leaves, dreaming

in the daylight, finding faces in the clouds,

waiting for something - but not knowing

the intermezzo would ever end.