Counting

what happened to the year
or the one before that
or even the one when
i waited on line for forty
minutes to buy gas
to travel across the state
to watch an artist weave
a basket on a shaker form

what happened to the year
i sat in a coffeehouse talking
about existential writers as if
my universe depended upon
believing that they wrote reality

what happened to the year
i walked beyond the mirror
into a new landscape

my book of years grows thick
a few pages overlap