Time’s Second Language

Time’s Second Language

I learned the first language early—

calendar grammar, clock syntax,

The verb that ticks.

~~

But time keeps a second tongue,

spoken in glances that last a beat too long,

in the steam that leaves the cup

after the apology lands.

~~

It conjugates waiting into weather.

It declines the word “soon”

until it means “what you can hold

without breaking.”

~~

A scar reads it fluently;

so does the seed, the kettle,

the bus that arrives exactly when

You stop needing proof.

~~

Your name and mine—

We were bad translators.

We counted minutes like coins,

starved in a pantry full of seasons.

~~

Time’s second language is hands:

wrists, remembering to unclench,

palms that know when to shelter

and when to pour.

~~

It’s also the space between replies—

not absence, but grammar:

The comma where breath lives,

The em dash that lets the heart

finish its thought.

~~

An oak outside my window

declines “now” and “always”

into rings I’ll never see.

It answers storms with

a quiet the dictionary forgot.

~~

I hear the other tongue in elevators,

in the sock that finally finds its pair,

in bread rising without witness,

How a child forgives by noon.

~~

When grief speaks, I listen twice:

Once the facts,

Once to the slow syntax under them

saying carry, breathe, set down.

~~

You asked what I’m waiting for.

Not a date; a fluency—

The ease of reading the day

by warmth instead of numbers,

to place the clock face down

and still arrive,

to understand what lasts

without needing to hurry.

~~

I am practicing daily:

watering what doesn’t beg,

greeting the kettle by name,

counting not the steps but

The sorrows I don’t take with me.

~~

When I speak this language well,

I think it will sound like walking home—

no translation, just feet and light,

the kind of sentence

Only living can pronounce.