Time in Disguise

September 28, 2025 Poet: Ann DiSalvo Artwork: Ammonite Fossil by Don Litchfield

Time in Disguise

I awoke unmoored in time

I'd lost synchronicity

like a film, with mouths moving

but voices lagging behind.

Is having two calendars

asking for trouble?

What day is it?

What day was it yesterday?

Rejuvenation Day.

Listening to one song

took away thirty years

but where are the sweet friends

with whom I listened?

Where is today?

How soon is tomorrow?

Nine hundred tomorrows

aren't soon enough

And yet one song

melted thirty years.

I have a fossil

on my windowsill

Seventy three million

years ago it jetted about

in a vast shallow sea

to the east of here,

but it died young.

Was there music then?

An ancient dirge

for the end of that world?

Foxes have always loved grapes.

Aesop may disagree,

in the sixth century.

While picking grapes from our vine, recently

the foxes came in a memory,

Two young foxes balancing

on the fence top,

coming for sweet grapes

in the night,

silvery in my flashlight beam.

They pivoted away, blinded,

soured on our modern light.

The grapes were just as sweet

to us last week.

Calendars, old songs,

fossils, Aesop's fox,

like a metronome that promises

to keep time, but ultimately

It too comes to a stop.

All just time in disguise.