Mom used to stay awake worried sick.
Waiting for signals to console her of our presence.
The rumbling below of the garage door opening
became her lighthouse in a dark sea.
The suction of the front door releasing a gust of winter up the stairs,
preceded by a screech of hinges,
and cloddish boots marking up the marble floor.
All a triumphant procession of rescue from the bleak torment of silence,
where imagination whispered.
Had our indolent boots marched us into danger two hours later than the established curfew,
on a night when we were expected to be gone,
then my mother would have dreamed deeply in safety and serenity.
It is only when presence is assumed,
when time is honoured, the signal triggers relief.
Is lawfulness and order something inscribed in our sense of time and presence?
If so, is lawlessness then absent, chaotic, and eternal?
Does time exist only for those who stay up waiting?
Does one leap through it when on a stroll that “lasts too long?”
Or shall we say, only too long for those still keeping track,
who are reaching out for presence?
Is it that those with a propensity for getting lost,
in the sense of a losing-track-of-one’s-time,
make a shelter of their absence?
They do not wait, but are waited-for.
Perhaps they live in an eternity
and perhaps the “waiting for” live in time.
Eternity becomes then the absence of all expectations and arrivals.
And listen! There can be no signal without time.
And so those who wait are punished,
dreading the pitiless sloth of the ticking clock,
actively wringing their hands in the laborious sweat of anticipation.
And those who are waited upon ascend to the shores of nonexistence,
in passive forgetfulness,
like the idle boy in a park caught staring too long at a strange cloud,
that looked like breasts.
Perhaps it is in the return of the prodigal where time and eternity meet at mother’s door.
Absence becomes presence.
Heaven and earth leap toward the table of love.
Time is relieved by desirable presence,
but tempered and strained, held together in a miraculous tension,
on the teetering edge of absence’s wondrous, adventurous, and lawless,
glow.
