A 1950s Perpetual Calendar Addresses Its Owner
Years bloom with roses brocaded
along my borders, no pages to twist off,
discard. I’ve barely altered
since you plucked me from a yard sale,
a sturdy card for each day and month
still sliding easily into my gold-plated frame.
You’ve changed though, from that January
you drove your new car back to college,
faking the gears until out of sight
of your parents. I’ve seen you shift
from handwritten letters in your dorm room
to the Remington on the attic desk, now
the laptop on your ocean-facing table.
I’ve witnessed scattered strands of gray
become a snowstorm, your supple skin
fold into complexities of age.
I watch how tenderly you shuffle
the months now, turn March upside down
and reinsert it as April. I wonder,
when you’re gone, will June for me
always begin on Tuesday?
Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, 2021 winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press, 2022) and a chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books, 2023). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming from Poetry South, Poetry East, Calyx, Chautauqua, Third Wednesday, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast with the ocean as her backyard and muse. More at www.joannedurham.com.
“The poem really says it all - I found this calendar at a yard sale fifty years ago and have kept it all that time on my desk. While phone calendars and wall calendars only last a year, this one, with its reusable pages, lasts forever. It's become something of a treasure.”