Tag: time and space

nevermore

in neverland: a retrospective

Nevermore near Never-Never Land had waited, abiding, until Time was done. Before she was Nevermore she was Space and she was here, tasting like soil & salt, iron & leaf, fruit & flesh.

No, she insisted, she did not need another distant photo of herself framed with an airy sentiment in glass. But Time and his countrymen either did not hear or did not care. She shrugged, sighed.

Before she was called Nevermore by the keepers of the Neverlands, she had been an endless, renewing enough: of water, bird, breath, wave, weed, gale, flame, and rain––wanting only to be tended, absorbed, heard, caught, ridden, warmed into, and met with open hands.

The Neverlanders thought instead to take and stake her, carving their names, instead projecting upon her the warped and boundless entropies of their endlessly whirring heads, as if to spin away from gravity herself where she palmed the souls of them at their feet.

Sigh again, winds, for those who can imagine no space greater than the ones between their ever-stopped ears, that neglect who is before them ever, in favor of Somedays and One Days and Next Times, claiming to Finally See.

––Until Nevermore, at the end of their Time, stopped hoping they would ever get around to the real work of tending, preoccupied as they were with their confidence and confidences.

She would retreat beneath the soils of herself again, fold her wet through running sands, run her rivers underground. Time went up and out––away, away––storming plans for monuments to legacies.

Sigh again, no longer asking for a hand to come for the tending, that wave now whisper, stay, to meet at last the rock of those waiting shores, and carve another layer smoother ––in.

tend

Time in Space

We need to talk
about time
& to talk with Time
eventually
instead of scheming
how to use it
to make the most
to have a good one
to have the best
to name its price
as with any commodity
any resource
as opposed to Source

to spend instead
recklessly &
listening for language
& other creatures
is to be folded inside
embraced by layered
fabrics of Time & their
attendant creatures
in
immersive intimacies
of waters, skies
where each breath
comes to carry the
next, yet uncaught.

Space lets go

they love their lines, don’t they, love?

they love their lines,
don’t they, love?

like, here body,
there mind &
soul on another
level still but
here’s what i
know, even the
space of no matter
has substance &
pretending some
other way is a runaway
cart horseless after
its fool self while
i the once upon a
river here been
wet and heavy
until a green
scar in scorched
earth & once
no longer moving
find cause
to remember
to weep for
what
mass was
once in me
for carrying
only
to find its
waters
gone come
back to me
Time i am
calling you
now
cross them

carrier pigeon

re: undelivered message

What I came here for was a thing for the moment. Ancient and entirely present.

Ready? You called, with so much enthusiasm, I thought you understood.

You know? I called back, amazed. Now retrace the original sin.

I do know! you shouted, and Now is the time! I took your slogans for sincerity. That was a long time ago. Now you repeat yourself. Sure, there’s a wolf somewhere, but when?

You don’t know time. We joke that you are it, given the terms of your world. In which you are all but your saving and still the sun. No other imaginable constant, and so not ready when the real one comes.

I am not sure to what extent the joke is mutual, but laughter is a means of survival in transit. Destination? Return to sender, we suppose. I have nowhere else I was planning to go. But here––

Okay, if you want, I say. Be louder. Wear more feathers. I don’t know what you think you are doing with any of that but they say it works somewhere.

Many love it––you constantly remind me, and anyone listening, of this truth. Your sacred red herring.

Go ahead. Offer it up again and again. Confess without words, how you love how they love it, even as they hold the alternative like a knife to your throat.

I don’t want to lead you into a frightening place, you smile. And wink, for the camera, again. Recasting illness as forbidden fruit, infestation as the alluring dragon guarding your treasures, your gilded selves.

What does an old bird say to something like this? With a sigh I assure you, I am not afraid. But for you.

You can lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to do for the one who keeps sending the cart far ahead of himself and away from her banks, to collect.

Okay then, friend. Carry on. It is easy to misread a moment. There is enough here to distract you from presence, and in a moment, I go, to carry back with me an awareness that most of yourselves will never know.

benediction

from a time beside ours

Child. How old do you think I am?
Don’t answer. What can you know
of time, having tasted–-what, a drop?

What fills your mouth has enough
volume to fill the space of the cave
around your tongue. Hold it there
and pay attention.

Don’t talk to me about time’s layers
when an atom has flown like pollen
into your nose to stick like a note
at the back of your throat,
substance enough––

to make you sneeze it from yourself
like one or another abstract theory
about its essential substance
as though your words can do you
any good in your current state.

Taste, child. Try holding
what comes. Swallow.
Know nothing. Try again.

This is what we do.
They spit on our foreheads.
It does not mean to us
what the spitting kind want
it to mean, and so we carry on.

dogear

creased cosmos

If the only given I may assume asserts this universe as a story in pieces, with each unseen place a fiction to be assembled from salvaged shards of knowns and unknowns found and undiscovered bits, then my only conclusion may be to wonder at the mosaic brilliance of the map that swallows the all that any of us witnesses, in the valley of the trace of a single fold.

after Dionne Brand

Impermanence

Time, space, heat, weather.

And I said, no, dear. Without any claims on infinity, I am only
here, threaded by vessels to this time where they river thick
until I don’t know when and many are broken but enough
keep on, motley constellation of us around aorta’s arch.
Much of what passes for memory whispers in that hush
with dawn’s birdsong of some impending rush––out, out!
It will run when that geography comes to catch in dust
or metal, the rust of us howling ––you can’t, you can’t!
we shrieked, catch me! and fast and faster than you
thought we were racing from that place but into it too
we were content to move in circles and knew nothing
of direction and content with little else but the chance
to spill the contents of ourselves those shrieks those
cries that liquid laughter out and out, nearer.

Shoreline Notes

On nearness

I kept meaning to see it, and the intention throbbed like impending heartbreak. To chronicle the residents, for example, of a hot afternoon lakeshore: the stained-glass wings of dragonfly in cattail, then open space, beach-like; blankets, sunbathers. Where a child laughs, running, and the rooftops beyond the green with gulls above these and the trees and how peace is the word of the day, so peaceful, the sunbathers say. You cannot see the killings from here. Or how somewhere an old soul is returning and a new one, not yet known in this place, is being born, formed like a new star from the compression of elements over time. And of compassion, that ache of the imagination. And the nearness of death and our proximities to one another in the face of an unnamed annihilation, and of this we know nothing so go on remembering––to a point. These layers of time assembled and striated on our shelves, against nature which prefers the susurrations of breath and heartbeat, waves––those notes that only come in wholes. Now the ritual. Bread, wine, hands. Forgive me sister, stranger, friend. Forgive me, child, for I know not what I am beyond that glass. So I stare into it in this silence, trying to sing.

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