Life / approximately

for A

340,000 hours, more or less,

depending on our fear of the dark,

or the solicitation of dreams

or a swallowing up inside loss

or any bacchanal of forgetting

or trolley of thought

so they pass on,

each day, 28,000 give or take, divided by the blues makes our joys dense,

we will hang on for dear life to our 948 months, threaded by

our own undone body and the balmy, candied being of our other

wading together into gaudy

polychromatic dawns

or into lustrous sleeplessness

by way of weakness this is

how we remember the months that render into mere nickels and dimes, 79, maybe

more, tragically fewer, years of our

approximate life so I watch

your lips revise themselves by the millisecond

it’s how I tick off the moments.

Cy Twombly, Untitled (from 8 Odi di Orazio), 1968