time’s up

10

you are seven years old/you play jumprope at recess with girls/and today the teacher on duty pulls you away/and tells you there is something terribly wrong with you/and you cry

9

you are twenty-one years old/one of the most intelligent and beautiful young women in the Universe is your sweetheart/and you don’t appreciate her/till she isn’t your sweetheart any more

8

you are thirty-five years old/your child’s head is crowning and you can see hair/and the doctor comes in and shoulders you out of the way/and at eight fifty-seven pm he says “it’s a girl!”

7

you are forty-nine years old/and your wife  suggests you might “discreetly date” other women/ and caps the lopsided discussion with “just don’t make a fool out of me”

6

it is the weekend of your fifty-eighth birthday/and you are in a tent on a campsite with the woman you love/and it has been intermittently raining/and she tells you something that breaks your heart

5

you are sixty years old/and you live in one of the most beautifully landscaped places on Earth/and you are walking outside in the dark/and thanks to the light pollution laws there are an unbelievable number of stars in the night sky

4

you are today years old/midway through a poem/speculating about the future/and letting your mind wander

3

you are a hundred and fifteen years old/looking in the mirror after your fourth rejuvenation/flexing the taut muscles of your forearms/and a disembodied voice says “what kind of day would you like–regular, or frisky?”/and you reply that you want to be with a friend/and soon you and gillian are on your way to laos/to visit and play games with her kids

2

you are eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-one years old/and your spark inhabits the body of an orangutan/and you use your gangly arms to swing through trees in the tangy, humid jungle, and you intend to exercise to exhaustion and then have a boy-orangutan have his way with you/so that you will add another unique experience to your extensive collection

1

you are twenty billion years old, more or less/and Old Sol has engulfed the Earth in red swollen expansion/and you and a cluster of like minds/are “dancing” on Europa/the while participating in a lively symposium/loosely themed “What NOW?”

0

the universe has wound down/the stuff of it has cooled to just above absolute zero/and you use your remaining crumb of hoarded energy/to do a rewind of your trillion-year lifetime/kissing lovers hello/apologizing for all of your misdeeds/revelling in the lush loving episodes of yore/with a certain grand detachment/until you face the seven-year-old boy you used to be

you tell him with your last bit of consciousness/that playing jumprope with the girls in defiance of that nasty teacher was your crowning achievement/and both of your ghosts smile

as you fade into the cosmic fuzz of the mysterious Beyond