Me and Mine at the Time

It was back on Monday

The sixteenth of December
Twenty-thirteen, revised
Gregorian calendar,

Beethoven's birthday.
Joan Fontaine and Peter O'Toole
Were just dead. The sky
Was rosy as the frozen rocks,

Rosy as Homeric dawn.
We were alive. We rose
From our beds with minor
Complaints and hugs

To begin another minor day
Under the perpendicular
Canyon walls we'd chosen
To be where we wanted to be home.

The news was the usual

Spies, crimes, and coups.
The house held the usual
Worries, expenses, and chores.

Time and I, thick as thieves,
Blood kin, never wholly
Contented but forever short,
Prospected together,

Back and forth across
The ordinary impossible,
The delusion of somewhere
To have been, somewhere

To go. However blue
The sky grew, I fell in love
With being what we were,
As what I was observed

We were all one family,
Daughter, mother, father,
Time and I. Stephen Fry
Author of The Liar

Was reported to have said
In honor of O'Toole, just
Dead, "Monster, scholar, lover
Of life, genius." Time. Mine.