The Bridge of Time

Tonight there is a table, and on it a glass of wine
the color of a vein held up to a candle.
Your hand rests on my hand. Rosemary
still clings to your fingers from the bread.
This — the universe’s realest work — is happening here.

Physics is strange about the word now.
Your now and mine already differ by the pulse in our wrists.
The starlight trembling on the wine left its star
before your grandmother drew breath — some of it
before the harness-maker first smelled the sea.
So the dark above this table holds every year at once,
layered, patient, still arriving.

Time bends where mass leans into it —
the way your head leans now into my shoulder.
It slows inside that warm dent,
giving us one stolen sliver of a second
the rest of the galaxies will never own.

Einstein, burying his oldest friend, wrote that the line
we draw between was and is and will be
is only a stubborn illusion.
The dead are not behind us. They are elsewhere —
still living in rooms we simply aren’t standing in.

Nothing that ever happened has stopped happening.
The harness-maker is still fleeing the burning harbor.
The boy is still looking back from the bridge.
The grandfather still turns the bolt in his hand.
The girl is still boarding the ship that will outlive the Sun.
They are not memory. They are lit rooms I cannot enter —
all burning at once.

For the length of one glass of wine I almost see it:
not a line of years but a single turning sky,
Van Gogh’s wild swirls obeying the same law
as rivers and storms — big whirls giving birth
to smaller ones, down to the stillness
at the center of the table.
We were never random.
We are the turbulence. We are the wet paint.

We are built for the small word next,
hungry for the next inch, the next breath, the next touch.
But minds are coming who will drink the whole sky
without squinting — who will live
where we can only visit for the length of one glass.

Here is the secret the equations never wrote:
the door to all of it was never out there.
It was this table. Your hand. The rosemary.
The wine the color of blood and light.
You do not reach the whole sky by leaving the table.
You reach it by staying — by pressing your thumb
into the warm bones of a living hand
until the illusion cracks
and every room swings open at once.

So reach across it. Now — which is every now —
put your hand back on mine.
His hand. Now mine. Now yours.
Twelve thousand years this family has opened doors.
This is the one thing in all of it you close:
the last inch of air between us.
Close it.