Birthday
by Ellen Steinbaum
And so I move another year away.
I have a new haircut now,
but you would recognize me still:
I look exactly
as if I were the same.
You will not grow old
or stooped or slowed.
Caught in crystal time
you wait
while I wear out,
while my body
imperceptibly accumulates
the weight of passing days
that we will spend apart.
I will be older than you
will ever be.
I will pass your age
become so old
that I am new,
and change a minute at a time
until nothing is left
of who you knew,
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until the space between us lengthens
so that one day if you saw me
(if such a thing were possible)
you would mistake me
for a smiling distant relative,
an elderly aunt from crumbling photo albums.
You might sense a vague remembrance
and wonder if we’d ever met.