time stabs you like brutus

time stabs you like brutus,

maybe not in the back

but while looking you right in the eye

through an untouched pad of drawing paper

that you see still sitting on top of the shoe shelf,

where you’d put it

when you came back from fred meyer,

where you’d grabbed it for your son

as an afterthought, along with a science magazine,

after getting one for his younger sister

to supplement the new box of markers for her,

which had been the only item of that whole set

to have originally been on the shopping list.

people — everyone, but us parents especially —

we all take it for granted that time is our bosom companion,

ready to reach over and pat us on the back

for the assumptions we make about how what’s to be

will match what’s come before

and for the magnanimous largesse

we’ve been bestowing upon those in our realm of dependence

ever since we crossed the rubicon of ruling at home,

but actually that abstract arm is often reaching over

to knife us between the ribs

with the fact that meaning can drain out of anything

out-of-the-blue, like the fickle opinion of the crowd,

and our rome is better off without

such unwieldy ambition leading the way.

this is like the other day

when I called cirque climbing to remind them

we still had a gift basket for their pull-down event

in the museum’s gift shop closet

and the owner esteban told me apologetically

that they’d all been sick for a while

but that he’d send someone to get it

that afternoon, and like that I realized

it had almost been a year since my son

told us he wanted to drop out of the climbing team,

an interest of his I’d come to take for granted

in the same way I’d assumed he’d always

want to indulge his talent for drawing,

but I’m forgetting in this analogy

caesar’s true best friend marc antony,

who eulogized him so eloquently

that the masses drove the conspirators

out of town, thence to a battlefield

that saw many on both sides dead by the end of the play.

lend me your ears, my children will say —

to whom I don’t know from this past vantage point —

as they mock time’s slander of this great man

who led by letting others’ changeable nature

take center stage as a theme to be contemplated

with respect, over the myth of a protagonist

with an identity so rigid it alone can carry the weight

of our interest to the end of the poem.