351. Seven Days from Now

So strange you might say it is
to be always one week behind
so that I could ask you to tell
me what the next seven days
would be or even how I would
look those seven days later all
arranged in such a way that a
Wednesday would always be a
Wednesday and we were both
born on a Wednesday just one
for me that was one week after
the one made exactly for you.

Must be a long time to go to
wait, or seems like it, to live
a life that you have already
lived, just a little ahead of me,
though there is the question
why your heart surgery came
before mine by much more
than those perfect seven days,
so it seems that the world is
not in such synchronicity as
I might wish it were for it all
to seem to fit together for us.

There is a sequence to seeing
what will happen in the world
and when, and we are left to
make the most of its unending
ordering of events, done enough
to make every act a memento
of something expected to happen
again or forward from the time
of its first happening, and it
must be that the easiest thing
to remember is something that
happens before it actually does.

Quite without intending to (and
we could not be blamed for it),
we were born, a week apart and
at opposite sides of the country,
this broad continent, yet age and
finally place brought us together
because we were set to live at
the same time and through these
same events of history, as if we
had anything to do with it, as if
we were more than spectators to
external events not made from us.

How both our hearts gave us up,
despite our thin bodies, seems a
kind of synchronicity too, that we
cannot understand how the earth
responds to us even when we
do not intend to communicate
with it, that we wake each day
not settled with any events for
that day, yet they come inexorably
and we cannot avoid what comes,
whether expected or not, and
nothing is really ever expected.

I remember you live in a place out
far enough that my phone could
not snatch a signal, and I was
left in the night without a way to
reach out to the rest of the world
with my voice and I wrote, as I
often do, notes from the hotel room
to friends of mine across the world
because the only voice is not a voice,
and a word written onto a slice of
paper disappears more slowly than
one we have spoken into the air.

For this reason, I write you this note,
just as you end the year when you are
fifty years of age, and near when I
will end the year when I too was
fifty, so that you will have some note
from me, to remember that you are
always seven days older than I am,
whether I am alive or dead, whether
you are, and because even a joke told
many times over in person can be
soon forgotten, but a letter you will
have lose or decide to destroy to forget.