Arts Alive San Antonio

Alexandra van de Kamp’s poem Dear Time is a poem you’ll want to reread multiple times to discover all the subtle surprises woven into her verses. Alexandra is well known in San Antonio and beyond as the executive director of Gemini Ink, but she is also the author of two poetry collections and a translator of women poets from Spain.

The surrealistic art included here is Rene Magritte’s Empire of Light that sets a nocturnal scene against a bright blue sky – something is amiss with the world! The painting is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, which is part of the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation.

Dear Time,

By Alexandra van de Kamp

I thought there was an agreement here,
a fistful of birds that I could carry

from one moment to the next
in my half-closed hands

without being bitten
by their peculiar beaks. A day,

I’m finding, is a letter written
in someone else’s script, a kind of wobbly

transcription the air brushes along my lips.
The trees murmur like deceased

aunts spilling cups of tea in their
ginger laps. Lips. Laps. The lush insistence

of you, time, pushing against everything
we do. You are a shivering, unflinching

closeness, a tune we all have stuck in our heads,
as we lift blue towels from the washing machine,

drag our minds through the news,
tally the dead, frail as daffodils

trailing their stubborn pollen
along our outstretched arms.

I wake with a quaking inside me, a to-do list
of vitamin pills, the precise

wording of half-written emails, and conversations
intricate as medieval tapestries
                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            glistening with their multitude of tiny threads.
I write to you, dear time, minister of fear

and sex and the hope of the body,
to inject purple breath into my afternoon, to grab      

at the visible tremor of a tree’s
fog-laced leaves, to note the streetlamp

in a Magritte urban square—the oncoming
darkness momentarily stalled

before that quiet glow.

I want to stuff my mind with all the living I can—
mortality be damned! Let’s relish another tablespoon

of that tarragon-seasoned lobster sauce
against the gray glass

of a Houston skyline.

How a delicate terror
builds itself within me.