I didn’t think “this isn’t happening,”
or “why?”
My biggest grievance
was that nobody appreciated the irony
that our song that summer was Time in a Bottle.

We would let it stream from our ricketing car
as we pirouetted down the highway,
or watch its delicate strumming spin a spider’s web
in the kitchen.
She would do her elephant’s ballet
and I would stretch across the floor
(exactly where she died, as if I were the understudy,
rehearsing for a role I would rather have played).
One of us would mention how sad it was that Jim Croce died at 30
and the other would wonder if he knew,
when he wrote Time in a Bottle,
that his own Time was spun sugar in the rain,
even though we both knew
that he died in James Taylor’s plane crash.

He couldn’t have known,
because when we spend our last day together
over and over in my dreams,
I don’t sing of eternity and wishes in a hollow voice
or pluck a melody that bobs with the hypnotic satisfaction
of a sewing machine’s needle.
I just cling to our last movie stub
like it might blow away
and say “this sucks.”