the weight of tomorrow
tomorrow weighs
exactly seven wet sparrows,
one unopened letter,
and the button that falls from your coat on the first cold morning of every year.
it weighs the breath between lightning and thunder,
the last peach left hanging after the orchard has gone to sleep,
my father's watch whenever it remembers his childhood.
it is lighter than a window full of rain,
heavier than a staircase trying not to become a river.
the grocers sell it by the handful.
old women carry two tomorrows in their aprons,
just in case someone drops one on the walk home.
children keep tomorrow inside their pockets,
where it collects small stones, feathers, and names that have not yet been spoken aloud.
once,
i tried to lift next tuesday.
it looked so little resting there beside the bread.
i could scarcely raise it from the table.
perhaps this is why
the sky leans
so carefully
upon the trees.
the taste of a country where gravity sleeps on wednesdays
it tastes
of apples that have forgotten how to fall.
of rooftops still warm from children.
of umbrellas
opened
upside down
to catch
the sky.
every tuesday evening,
people tie their teacups to the table,
their dogs to the moon,
their names to their collars,
lest morning carry them away.
on wednesdays,
the rivers climb hills out of curiosity.
the smoke returns to the chimneys.
old women keep handfuls of pebbles in their aprons,
feeding them to anyone who begins to drift.
i have never crossed its border.
still,
every thursday,
the earth
feels
a little heavier
than i remember.
the colour of silence
it is not white.
white belongs to paper, to winter, to the inside of unopened letters.
silence is older.
it is the colour of a key forgotten inside a lock
for a hundred years.
the colour of the sky
just before birds remember their names.
of rain
still waiting
inside the cloud.
of mirrors
when nobody has looked into them
all day.
it is the colour my grandmother folded between the towels
every sunday,
so the house would not wake too suddenly.
it is the colour of a piano
dreaming
it still has forests inside it.
sometimes
at dusk,
the trees
hang their silence
out to dry,
and all the neighbours
pretend
not to notice.
once,
i held silence
up to the light.
it turned
the exact colour
of someone
about to forgive me.
Author's Note
i have always been suspicious of the things we call impossible.
perhaps because so many of the things i love most begin there: a staircase that should not lead to the sea, a country that exists only while dreaming, a silence with a colour, tomorrow heavy enough to hold.
these poems began with a question i couldn't quite answer: what if the impossible had its own rules?
so i gave it some.
a little physics. a little weather. a few impossible countries. some wet sparrows.
and, underneath all of it, the things that are much harder to measure: homesickness, memory, forgiveness, the strange weight of becoming.
perhaps that is what these poems are trying to do.
not explain the impossible.
just make a small place where it can be true.
