~
Yesterday, the split of prokaryotes
Of course, humans don’t understand time well at scale. The past
is soup, each new marjoram memory, an herb pinch, a carrot sliver,
shaved white onion. My daughter props palms on the counter
and surveys the cutting board like a queen over a world map. The Isle
of Mushroom. Parsley Peninsula. Garlic, Parmesan steer the ship.
She can read the recipe, but she wants me to guide her.
Up until recently,
she spoke of all past events as yesterday. I would correct her,
tell her what happened a year ago, or last month.
For a bit, she slipped often, but now she’s replaced
‘yesterday’ with “remember when I was two.”
Part of me likes to think that something in her, in all of us,
travels at the speed of light, careens through the stars like something
fired from a pulsar, blurs the boundaries of our universe like a mountaintop
view through cheese cloth, like the hot spring of boiling broth and steeping
stock leaching something that lived in the bones. When it’s done,
we can all be ladled into jars because our minds are too slow
to keep up but damn it smells so good in the kitchen and I don’t
remember when I was two
or remember that tomorrow
we will visit the pond I grew behind yesterday, beat our way through
the skunk cabbage and sit among south shore cattails to observe
what state the tadpoles are in. Obviously, dinner is not done,
but at her age ‘stir for three minutes’ is like terminal diagnostics
and the onions in their butter haven’t yet caramelized.
At dawn, Time, blind
and gnawing at quantum foam, writhes its nose into pores
because one bore will widen enough to allow for indefinite
middleness; the sunrise, the flares on the water that rainbow
the minutes of mist and dew and cast the longest shadows
from imprints of my daughter’s soles; there, where the heel
pressed deepest, a puddle smaller than a quarter in which
paramecium waft their flagellum and know nothing.
What small a sliver of the whole stew is their universe.
I don’t remember when I was two, but it must have been
handprints in flour. Spilled sugar sparkles.
~
Andrew Najberg
Andrew Najberg is the author of The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press, 2007). His individual poems and short fiction have appeared in North American Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Cimarron Review, Louisville Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies both online and in print. He teaches creative writing and other courses full time for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and he received his MFA in creative writing from Spalding University. Find him at Twitter @AndrewNajberg or Facebook @AndrewNajbergAuthor.