Whenever my husband and I are trying to leave the house we seem to find other things that need to be done first. For example: we are going out to the grocery store and my husband will need to go to the bathroom. Then I will start unloading the dishwasher, so my husband will go to the basement to switch the laundry into the dryer and suddenly I will need to go to the bathroom. This is such a regular habit of ours that the kids named it - faking the leave: as in “are you ready to go or are you still faking the leave?”
I thought maybe ours was the only family where this happened until I found the following poem in the Washington Post Book World Poet’s Corner. The author is Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate of the United States. She says she wrote the poem because of her habit of “suddenly having to do all kinds of things” when it was time to go someplace. She says she was “spurred to action by not having time”. She says she could “now read it as a meditation on the approach of death” but that’s not where it started.
The Edges of Time
It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.
My father, who is 95 years old, has been hospitalized 3 or 4 times since Christmas. Every time he goes in I am frightened that this will be his last trip. But a couple days of intravenous antibiotics and he bounces right back. He will go when he is ready. Until then he is just faking the leave.
