Verses by @QuietDialectic

A cup cools on the sill, its steam undone
by morning air that carries salt and tar
from somewhere past the rooftops, where the sun
is still a rumor, not yet risen far.

The kettle ticks as metal cools again.
A fly rehearses at the windowpane,
persistent in a language without words,
and finds the glass, and finds the glass, and finds
the glass once more, and does not understand.

I think the ordinary is a kind
of patience: how the dust accepts the light,
how shadows lean across the floor and stay
a while, then go, and leave the boards as bright
as if they had forgotten they were gray.

What we call permanence is mostly habit:
the clock that keeps its small mechanical faith,
the chair that holds the shape of who once sat in
it, the slow arithmetic of breath.

And time, which is no river but a room
we furnish with our comings and our goings,
will keep the cup, the ticking, and the fly,
and hold them lightly, knowing they are loanings.

Outside, the iron gate complains against
its hinge, the way a grief will find its voice
each morning, rust rehearsing what it lost.
The ivy takes the railing inch by inch,
a green insistence nothing asked it for,
and somewhere down the street a bicycle
squeaks past the bakery, and the day begins
its small accounting, counting what remains.