time Archives

Seaglasses

Our tumbled shards.

sounds called what we would not say

until the shadows in our ears besieged

our remainders we screamed

for their release but they stayed

laughing into our wet faces

we could not see them

or our faces where we stayed

the stank breath of death rot

creeping through our breaths

stopping the songs

we meant to sing

of how we flew

after scratching our snakeskins

we were removed and outside

we could not hear the songs

in the street as the dragon still

spread the photos called

our monsters out

to hush them back

Time ran off

we had the babies’

toothless mouths looking back

lining their faces in half-moons

on our beds and with them looking back

we kited from the cells anchored

by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth

to one day fit ourselves back

into homes we had once carried

on our backs before we left

the sea

before the after

we left it

back there for the

sea

The first thing we grasped was that we were made of one part here and another just outside us. The next was that Time was made of more than one kind of stuff. Now it held us; now it was a river beyond. Now an elaborate ice castle, now air and what flew on it. Then it was in us somehow, overlapping breath but more.

Was it a fabric? Some spoke as though it were something to be measured, conquered, won. But then, some spoke of nearly everything in those terms. Let time no longer be imposed on us, said another, imagining it a medium to be shaped, like clay. Some had a bias toward thinking that the moment at hand was a new Time. For others, the future could not be born without events, and until these happened, none existed that we could name.

There was much we couldn’t name. This was not a beloved idea. Often, it seemed to be measuring us, and while many fell, none of these were Time.

Painting Time

Lights over water.

Of all your characters, you were most interested in Time, the fifth elemental substance latent in all things. You aimed to chronicle its flow by detailing refractions of brilliance on the river and its bridge, one forever changing and the other reaching toward permanence. You noted symbols in the shadows where one overlapped the other: the river, the bridge, their people; the hope of construction and the tragedy of collapse; the continuance of water and this incomplete permanence in concert with all forms, its eye a chorus.

***

Inspired by the work of Ivo Andrić (1892-1975), whose birthday is today.

Altitude

And the ones who come down.

In another world, everyone lives in the mountains where time falls more slowly. To boast in this world is to speak of the heights you knew, have known, will soon attain. The elites put their houses on stilts.

Only the careless leave the peaks for the valleys, to feel the soft grasses and the waters of the streams and lakes. The people of the heights watch them and scoff at the waste, but sound is denser in the lowlands, so the swimmers cannot hear them––not with the all of the birds and the crickets and the lowland creatures in the grasses and not with the water in their ears. It took them by surprise at first, the noises spilling out of these lowlands.

What’s that? They wondered at first. Later, they knew it was time. The creatures released it. The visitors caught what they could and threw it back. They began to make their own and it was music.

***

Inspired by one of the worlds described in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, (“26 April 1905”).

Arrival, Departure

The visitor.

There is a visitor in the doorway, both inside and out, with no movement except turning the whole world, reminding anyone who cares to look, just how close it is––the possible entrance, the potential to end.

Who are you? Someone asks the visitor, and the visitor replies, I’ve been here the whole time.

Window Mirrors

These growing beyonds.

An old problem: how to phrase

the far-away steeples.

How to abandon a conversation

made of one part memory

and the other projection?

Which time is it now, the world

of memory or the procession

of days marching to the iron-fisted clock?

What grows beyond the window over there,

and who has a mirror?

Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal

to ourselves and our aboves:

Look, here.

***

The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.

Topography in Time

And spatiotemporal slippage.

Sure, I can nod when I hear the term. I can even use it myself. Watch. Space-time continuum. Like I know. Like I’m not still wondering what any of this actually is, and why this witness, this now, if that is what this––is (Was? Will be?).

Perhaps this is not a term for me to be using. Frankly, I’m not even so sure about some things that appear to be much more concrete, like, say, the salt flats, or pinecones.

I will confess, I have not experienced time as a continuum, although I have played along with the idea. I have no way to verify whether others are also playing along, but I always seem to be sliding in and out of whatever this is, like a tiny microbe in a net designed for larger creatures. Now in, now out, and if the net is pulled up, will I know?

If time is like movement and place is like a pause in the current, does it follow that a witness can only know a place because of time, and does this mean that space is time made visible?

My mind is surely porous, but what about time itself, and to what extent is this mind made of it, and if space is the clearings between known points, is it infinite?

Don’t answer. Whatever you tell me, I’ll probably just nod like I get it, and float on.

Scaling the Hours

Experiments in measurement.

An experiment in time, the idea for breaking it at the hours. You can, if you are willing, do what most children won’t. You can carve them as one would with an animal at the harvest, follow the joints––or lumber, into pieces to be assembled again, one segment at a time, the collected tasks the bearings for the dizzy hand, some terms that a body less willing to invite the dizzy spins can hold. Only by these cuts can we arrive at the conclusion, so often remarked by the aging, about how short it is. A child knows that a while a moment may be short, a glide, a song––Again, again!

––it may also be made of so much forever that it becomes impossible to tell a body’s beginning from its end.

Time Out of Mind

A quilted retrospective.

After the sand of the hour had spilled from the mantle, I kept watch beside myself in low tide mirrors, the sea at my ankles returning us to the corners of childhood libraries. With bare feet resting in tulip beds, I borrowed confidence from open pages and read to them. Their still-unopened faces swayed in blind brilliance and we held there, unknowing.

Seasons passed and we were separated until I was alone at the edge of a wasteland. I had a threaded needle and no pattern in sight. I spent a long time dreaming. Once in the warehouse, time’s gears were in pieces on the floor. I held a face in my hands, and it whispered reminders. I would need to fold the fields behind me first, then set to stitching.

I wore fire against the rain and cut a new dress from the remnants of the last harvest. Gorged on ripe losses, my scalp sang anemones. Hold, I whispered to the new blooms, that they might stay until the hour returned.

***

Inspired by images in this article about the work of Ukranian artist Oleg Oprisco, known for creating surreal settings from everyday elements.

In Search of Lost Time

Overheard.

What are you looking for?

Time, I was going to reference an old story––

That’s gone out of print. There’s no catching it now,

but get this. A ventriloquist and a bullfighter walk

into a bar and learn that it isn’t one. The place is

a bank now. “I disagree!” remarked one or the other,

you can never tell with ventriloquists. They walked

out dazed, looking for a sign they could read.

Tag: time