Catherine Elaine - Semantics

Verbs slip from past to present to future
without care or pause.

As schoolkids, we learn their difference.
We plot diagrams with chalk.
We conjugate and categorize and learn
which is right,
which wrong,
where,
and why.

As writers, poets, teachers, we
savor them like candy,
rolling them around our tongue,
our hearts,
our minds,
these carriers of our
hopes, our memories, and
our tiny, ineffectual snapshots of now.

None of that, however, helps
me discern this:

It was an ordinary day.
15 minutes ago, the phone rang.
(past, irregular) .
“We’ll let know you the arrangements”.
(future, contraction) .
A half hour ago, the change
(necessary by nature) :
A 90-year woman, slipping away
(participle) .

She refused all food except one
serving of Jello
(hardly a appetizing choice for a last meal) .
They gave her morphine, to make her “comfortable.”
Dying a slow death comfortable—
of all the oxymorons,
of all the irony.
Over Christmas, she grabbed my hand;
hers was sickeningly soft, but her grip
desperate and, for a few seconds, strong.

A rag doll limp with defeat
(present, but not for long) ,
passes.
She is, now she was.

On the page, it’s a simple transition.
Grammar guides our script
in this cyclical play.
Verbs come easy.
This is, of course, ordinary.
158,857 people die each day.
They are, and then they were.

But, I confess,
my heart is still lost,
my brain is still stuck
on
tense.

Catherine Elaine

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/semantics/