48 Time poems

Erstwhile means long time gone. A harbinger is sent before to help, and also a sign of things to come. Like this blue stapler I bought at Staples. Did you know in ancient Rome priests called augurs studied the future by carefully watching whether birds were flying together or alone, making what honking or beeping noises in what directions? It was called the auspices. The air was thus a huge announcement. Today it’s completely transparent, a vase. Inside it flowers flower. Thus a little death scent. I have no master but always wonder, what is making my master sad? Maybe I do not know him. This morning I made extra coffee for the beloved and covered the cup with a saucer. Skeleton I thought, and stay very still, whatever it was will soon pass by and be gone.

We were sitting there, and I made a joke about how it doesn’t dovetail: time, one minute running out faster than the one in front it catches up to. That way, I said, there can be no waste. Waste is virtually eliminated. To come back for a few hours to the present subject, a painting, looking like it was seen, half turning around, slightly apprehensive, but it has to pay attention to what’s up ahead: a vision. Therefore poetry dissolves in brilliant moisture and reads us to us. A faint notion. Too many words, but precious.

When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake And die as fast as they see others grow; And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Perishable , it said on the plastic container, and below, in different ink, the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed. I found myself looking: now at the back of each hand, now inside the knees, now turning over each foot to look at the sole. Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants, then at the arguing jays. Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking. Coffee cups, olives, cheeses, hunger, sorrow, fears— these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when. How suddenly then the strange happiness took me, like a man with strong hands and strong mouth, inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

‘Dockery was junior to you, Wasn’t he?’ said the Dean. ‘His son’s here now.’ Death-suited, visitant, I nod. ‘And do You keep in touch with—’ Or remember how Black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight We used to stand before that desk, to give ‘Our version’ of ‘these incidents last night’? I try the door of where I used to live: Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide. A known bell chimes. I catch my train, ignored. Canal and clouds and colleges subside Slowly from view. But Dockery, good Lord, Anyone up today must have been born In ’43, when I was twenty-one. If he was younger, did he get this son At nineteen, twenty? Was he that withdrawn High-collared public-schoolboy, sharing rooms With Cartwright who was killed? Well, it just shows How much ... How little ... Yawning, I suppose I fell asleep, waking at the fumes And furnace-glares of Sheffield, where I changed, And ate an awful pie, and walked along The platform to its end to see the ranged Joining and parting lines reflect a strong Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife, No house or land still seemed quite natural. Only a numbness registered the shock Of finding out how much had gone of life, How widely from the others. Dockery, now: Only nineteen, he must have taken stock Of what he wanted, and been capable Of ... No, that’s not the difference: rather, how Convinced he was he should be added to! Why did he think adding meant increase? To me it was dilution. Where do these Innate assumptions come from? Not from what We think truest, or most want to do: Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style Our lives bring with them: habit for a while, Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got And how we got it; looked back on, they rear Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying For Dockery a son, for me nothing, Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage. Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.

Fly from me does all I would have stay, the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped, every contract void, and flying in the crows lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep into afternoon and still wake soaring. So out come the bats, down spiral swifts into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream- figments then are gone like breath-prints on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever I hold however flies apart, the children skip into the park come out middle-aged with children of their own. Your laugh over the phone, will it ever answer me again? Too much flying, photons perforating us, voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter. Remember running barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s hovering, remember my hand as we darted against the holiday Broadway throng, catching your train just as it was leaving? Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet, horses coming from the field for morning oats, insects hitting a screen, the message nearly impossible to read, obscured by light because carried by Mercury: I love you, I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone, maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under- feather only then that too, yes, rained away. And when the flying is flown and the heart’s a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust- stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us, still some fledgling pledge?

And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth’s noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night: To feel creep up the curving east The earthy chill of dusk and slow Upon those under lands the vast And ever climbing shadow grow And strange at Ecbatan the trees Take leaf by leaf the evening strange The flooding dark about their knees The mountains over Persia change And now at Kermanshah the gate Dark empty and the withered grass And through the twilight now the late Few travelers in the westward pass And Baghdad darken and the bridge Across the silent river gone And through Arabia the edge Of evening widen and steal on And deepen on Palmyra’s street The wheel rut in the ruined stone And Lebanon fade out and Crete High through the clouds and overblown And over Sicily the air Still flashing with the landward gulls And loom and slowly disappear The sails above the shadowy hulls And Spain go under and the shore Of Africa the gilded sand And evening vanish and no more The low pale light across that land Nor now the long light on the sea: And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on ...

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he’s to setting. That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry.

Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time. Think how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory. Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils. His hope: intermittent. To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though he feels, true enough, death’s wither-clench. Thinking always of something permanent, watching the while how everything goes on changing. He has seen where Speed is buried. Eyes exorbitant. He has the tension of male and female: active, divided. Anger and lust. What he eats tastes exactly like real food. He would search out interphenomena, if he could decipher the interstices. The broken line. Immediate havoc. Circular heaven. Square earth. He cries world world, and there is no world. He claims superiority over the other animals, being the only one who can talk, the only one to have doubts. Herr Stimmung knows a whale is big. Its skeleton might shelter a dozen men. Not existing, not subsisting—in sisting. Not object, not subject— e ject. (He works within opposed systems, every one of them opposed to system.) “Fillette”—in confusion he addresses himself—“n’allez pas au bois seulette.” He knows who is allowed to wear what kinds of beads. He knows how fruit trees are inherited. All his self-objects lie in the inoperative past. Herr Stimmung springs from a long undocumented ancestry. He has a special attitude towards terror.

We never know if the turn is into the home stretch. We call it that—a stretch of place and time— with vision of straining, racing.  We acknowledge each turn with cheers though we don’t know how many laps remain. But we can hope the course leads on far and clear while the horses have strength and balance on their lean legs, fine-tuned muscles, desire for the length of the run. Some may find the year smooth, others stumble at obstacles along the way.  We never know if the finish line will be reached after faltering, slowing, or in mid-stride, leaping forward.