Off-Center

By Kay Harkins

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​Perhaps you remember that time
you opened one of those fold-out
timelines of history,
feeling your fingers slowly glide over the paper,
feeling its creases cross over
the expanse of time
from the Pleistocene era to the
tumultuous sixties.
How suddenly time got jangled up
and disconnected, and your fingers
flew up to the middle of your forehead.
Wait.
You felt a little like your four year old,
who, having first intently perused
her parents’ wedding album asked,
amazed,
“Who kept me during all of this?”
 
There were other times, of course,
in a field of flowers,
on a busy corner in LA,
or that old gazing into the night sky
when time melted and souls merged.
 
 
You have a place, but it’s not the center,
it’s somewhere along a vein, a vine, a branch,
out on a limb, but not alone.
 
How many more times will you need
to see you didn’t get here by yourself?
That you didn’t write your own story;
you were authored, then became co-author,
your story dancing among all stories:
Lucy,
Joan of Arc,  
Tecumseh,
Madame Curie,
Lincoln,
Sacagawea,
Lenin,
Harriet Tubman (worth far more than a $20).
 
No. You’ll just need to keep stepping into silence,
as dizzy as you were that moment with the time-line,
the earth spinning among the galaxies,
losing your balance, falling, necessarily,
like all those before you,
into the arms of eternal,
immense, agape Love.                       ​

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Kay Harkins is a writer, educator, artist and musician living in San Diego, California. Retired from a career teaching writing and literature, she continues to collaborate with other writers, artists and musicians and tends to her rose garden, her rescued greyhound Lazarus and the home she shares with her husband, to whom she has been married for over fifty years. She holds an MFA from Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Her most recent book is Queen of the Leaves: A Memoir of Lost and Found (2020).