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.