Time

You rent a squat in a building without a date.
The street has been flooded forty times—
this is the story people tell, but people,
they themselves have no dates. The church
kept them once but when the church became
poor like all good revolutionaries must,
the church forgot the dates. The formica
on the floor changes the patterns where walls
were but mostly the walls are stained
a dark red with the dye of the earth
off the streets. From this road, the house
on the hill is white as a sepulcher—up
there, el pueblo say, they have dates,
two massive high-ceilinged rooms
filled with dusty leather books,
and the remnants of the ancestors, those who
kept their African names and danced
around the spirits’ pole, they are
in the ledgers with dates. The people, they
do not keep dates, though this apartment
is a hundred years old, and smells of
bodies that have lived through the history
of a nation that has broken and remade
itself. But who knows these things?
Time is kept in a box that does not
remember dates. It is always full
of light, it always remembers now.