How to Make a Game of Waiting
Jennifer K. Sweeney
This is a capsized game
and there is no display of aces at the end.
Buy a rare and expensive plant that never blooms.
Rearrange your books by the color of the spines.
Bury all your keys that don’t unlock anything.
These are not rules but merely suggestions
of what has worked for others.
For instance, the man who painted landscapes
on his daughter’s sheet music.
Put a big rock on your desk.
Do not name the rock.
Take the numbers off the clock and mail them
to your creditors.
Stitch the hours onto a kite.
Every night, ask until you can hear what replies.
I'll add to the poem the following:
Buy a half dozen chili chocolate cake bites.
Eat them as if you were a very small squirrel
with very small teeth.
Do not eat them all at once.
Divide them and hide half in the burrow of a cabinet
as if inside a tree hollow.
When you have finished eating
do not ask, say, the words you have been swallowing
these long years.
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