Carried

We agreed to be reachable. That was the first one.
Mostly it was a kindness. The school could find us.
The hospital could. We put the phone on the nightstand
for the alarm, and the nightstand was the whole of it,
the entire distance, four feet, a lamp's worth.

We said yes to the Saturday league because it was good for them.
We said yes to the second one.
We answered an email on a Sunday and nothing came of it,
so we answered the next one faster.
We took the seven o'clock because everybody else could take it.
We said we were busy when we were not, and it held.
We bought the thing that saved us twenty minutes.

Nobody voted on the porch. The porch went anyway.
It became a place you cross with your keys already out.
The hour between school and dark went to practice,
and then the drive to practice took the hour before it.
The dentist's waiting room, which had been forty minutes
and a magazine about a boat we would never own,
became forty minutes of getting ahead.

We came out of it fitted.
The days shut now with nothing left over.

And when an hour comes loose, a cancelled thing,
a Sunday when the rain takes the whole schedule,
we stand in the middle of it
the way you stand in a room you walked into for a reason
and cannot, for the life of you, remember what it was.