Wax

No longer a candidate 
for safely depicting my coming age 
with an expanse of pink spiral pawns
I stare now at strange partners: 
a shaped tens-place number
staked next to three solo pillars;
four wax figures melting 
under the heat of their lit wicks.

An iPhone lights up, 
camera’s rolling.
People watch me; 
mind empties.

I concatenate 
      a few wisps 
                      of half thoughts
— dredged 
from my near-constant 
Perimenopausal haze — 
into an incomplete theorem,
the proxy of a birthday wish.

Even held within 
the rusty vault of my cranium, 
my cheeks flush with self-chiding;
I’d failed at wishing “correctly.”

Blow candles out; 
I can do that.

Pass the cake stand 
heavy with the amalgamation of 
chocolate bars and imported butter,
Flours and the essence of orchids, 
over to the guest offering 
to cut and pass slices.

Around the table, I take in:
Our parents, aging in real time
Our child, fickle and fabulous both
My sibling, deflated and brave, 
who bears witness of my birthday
of my whirling husband 
whose hands are always full 
of dishes or oven mitts 
or passing glasses full of cheer
while she sits somber, her body here,
her mind far away; fresh heartbreak.

Life is precarious
and awkward
and excruciating
and 
so, 
so 
swift.

Blink and Dad’s on a walker,
A frail giant, breakable, tender.
Mom’s famous raven curls 
now a head of steel coils, 
the silver and charcoal of an elder.

My in-laws trade with my parents
surgery and medical protocol stories 
complaints and medication cocktail ideas
they animate as they share
their own unfolding encounters 
with doctors and body fluids.

I take in our child, 
every bit of thirteen and a half, 
and all the hormones and huffery
that comes standard with that age.

And my husband, 
at last seated, 
eyes heavy with the fatigue 
of an endless day of preparations.
For me.

No snapshot can contain us

Time marches on, 
I grasp the moment as I can, 
with the same success 
of a toddler 
chasing a robin in the yard.