Into the coconut curry soup we made last winter –
its broth the same warm orange color
as the globed pendant lamp that glowed over
the kitchen table – we sprinkled fragrant kaffir
lime leaves plucked that day from the market’s freezer,
their summer perfume frozen forever
glossy green. Time blooms unseen, covert,
in odd directions. As the mother of our doctor
acquaintance, who would walk down each after-
noon to the 92nd Street Y, where on the rower
machine, she’d read three miles’ worth
of Proust. How far she she traveled, and where
I don’t know: the old pages’ sweet, familiar odor
lifting, the pink cheek gone suddenly young, aflower.