Minutes Are Fireworks

by: Jen McClanaghan

The sweetheart vine in all its finery, hauls itself
along the east-facing window, all the way up to heaven
if you believe in such places.

And the ant, his unusually long rig, gloved
in the shadow of the vine, traces circles on the window--
a sort of meditation on the afterlife.

If heaven isn't a promise to the tiny, a trading in
of their small strides, their love of crumbs and offer, instead,
two hands and a place at the table,

I don't know what is.

If heaven isn't an allowance to sleep
until noon, to wake and fall in love with
the purl of human activity below,

I don't know.

All of this, Sweet Reader, to say that in our one bear-suit,
in our numbers and our dramaturgy and our moments of me,
we arrive titanically at our own truths:

such natural disasters, they come only by surprise.
Like the sudden life of a tomato or the rose,
outrageously pink, on our annual cake.

Or how sunset, though cliche', is never merely pretty.
How I forget minutes are fireworks and stars
and the spark of hammered flint. And so do you, maybe.

That time, always dressed in its Sunday best,
is demanding we attend to it from within our strange animal skins
and our own hearts, which open on a waltz,

a ballerina in arabesque, on a miniscule needle
which touches down, a miracle of music boxes,
on the most beautiful-sounding teeth.