Tag: time

keeping time

on holding and release

Before going anywhere
we collect signs
from underground,
unseen but necessary.

I am interested in time,
but I will lose the clock
and I will lose the body,
still bearing the world.

branching with her
into other bodies—
bird, whale, tree
who collect me as
bower bird gathers blue—
glass, feather, button—
by arrangement.
I am tethered this way,
then let go.

But made for keeping,
I draw it close again,
marry it to breath,
to release what flies
from limb to future
limb, by losing

the thread—another
way to keep the fabric
as it thins.

Goodbye, we call
to the silhouettes
that shimmer past
what light it leaks
like ink in water,
blooming.

Zeno’s moon

notes from where the tortoise wins

Moon, don’t go. I have been too much in the sun with the golden people smiling fun. Listen, moon. I know what I am and I consent to this distance. If it connects me to you, let me trace the pads of my fingers along its lines. For nearly as long as I can remember, I have been reminded by the golden summer titans that my movement, whatever it was, failed to count as well as Time’s. The jolly clock-faced father-god. Time, they told me, bowing as they shushed my complaint against their rush, was fast and I had to keep up.  I did, blaspheming. 

Zeno had point about the arrow. If at any moment it was at rest in one position, in a time made of moments, how can it ever move? No, Achilles does not catch the tortoise. To do this he would have to reach where the tortoise began, by which time the tortoise would have moved on.

Fortunately, after this pause, the golden people have all gone to chase the sun, and it’s just us again, with the tortoise, stitching moments with no roundly sure clock face in sight.  I’m glad you’re here, moon. I know you won’t be, always. But I won’t go chasing all those not-yets, not while I’m drunk on the wave of your fragmentary diamond lights, winking into seas to kiss the shore, and me.

art and artists

opening notes of a survey

you can see us in Goya where
cannibal Time eats his children
hooded sisters pointing

to the door, bodies swallowed
by earth as if by probing black
in earnest, he would find

courage to move the brush
Rothko called them performers
Lorca waited on a ghost

to let it harness him by words

& when nowhere stood still we
gathered in twos and threes
hoping to hear the heart

of one living beat hard time
into heat where a mind’s
nerve breaks

a call or cry we wanted
to respond & drummed
an ache the tenderness

of those faces spectacular
& then it was late
all eyelids and moons

o death how

you insinuate

gone with

the tide

Then we came to the lamp, singing. What fun there was in those moments was not to be had, but had us. Then, stopping just short of being stretched to taffy with laughter, we parted. Time to go. The only way to hear was as an outcast. Inside, the ears get stopped by the noise of building fortress walls. Goodbye, each called, to find us again in waters, blooming.

wilding

to go forth, into seed, carrying on

If one day when finally tone-deaf I should walk guffawing into the solemn halls, swishing gauze skirts to knock stolid bishops over wooden kings while laughing too loud and blowing smoke rings, it may be observed, by anyone still living who knew me when I was more mild in manner and patient in my time, that she had been a patient woman, once.

But, as these things go, by the time the cork is good and gone, so are the ones with any memory of milder times. So, I will have to be ready when I finally go, to enter with full conviction into the role, because patience, however much a virtue, will only do until the time for waiting has run out, and after so much of that one has to decide to give up the temporary shelter that comes of waiting and dive in full and fast to what certain strangers will describe as the antics of an eccentric elder at fashionable parties, who, after all was just relentless with her offhand remarks, head back and laughing the whole time.

que c’est

Qu’est-ce que c’est ?

It is like wanting to be able to dance
in a place where my feet are steeped
in tar pits, and I am the soon-to-be exhibit,
wailing with my tusks turned to sky.

Je veux me réveiller et je veux croire
qu’il est peut-être possible de rester là,
pendant un petit moment avant d’être
choqué en retour d’accepter la violence
quotidienne.

I want to dream believing it is still possible
to stay there for a moment before
being shocked back into routine
acceptance of the routine violence
of a given day.

I sit here, bleeding, wanting to insist
let us not for now pretend to be saving
each other when simple company
is enough. If it isn’t, then what do I do
with this knowing? That you will never
hear.

The idea of rescue for anyone here is far
past the depths, and here is my confession.

I do not know what those depths are called.
I do not know this space. I cannot name this time.
And yet, time keeps insisting. On seeming to know
me. What a thing, imaginer.

But I suspect.
That something about being makes this happen.
Peut-être.
That I spend what life I have in service of what
I will never be able to offer in kind.

Où es-tu ? Je ne peux pas en voir.

Enough,
éventuellement.

When hope gives out, I only want
to dream.

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