One Summer

ONE SUMMER

One summer the hummingbirds

didn’t come back

at all. My father, who died

that fall, would

throw me the ball as if

looking elsewhere,

at the tree-hung cylinders

by the patio,

with their sugared water

but no birds.

I wasn’t fooled: I’d been

there before.

The track of an actual

ball or man

or hummingbird travelling

from here to there

is linear, even if there

is back there again.

But time, time makes

each point on that line

discontiguous,

each circle unclosed.

Here’s not where it was,

although it may

look that way,

viewed end-on,

from when the hummingbirds

do come back.