Simple Present
Oct 31 2020
When we learn to tell time
we're told it's clockwork,
lighted digits blinking off
hands steadily circling.
But even physicists,
who believe in universal laws
and measure things
meticulously
down to the last indivisible particle,
concede that time
can stretch as well as shrink.
My dogs inhabit the now,
never dwelling on the past
or fretting for the future.
So they live outside of time,
except as it applies
to dinner- , play- , sleep- .
They have achieved an enlightenment
to which only children and masters of Zen
can aspire.
I'm not nearly so transcendent,
but have at least learned
how supple time can be.
How, in that state of flow
when I'm immersed and intense
it goes in the blink of an eye.
While looking back
it's as if the clock had slowed,
a full life
as I take my time remembering.
And how, when I'm bored
time drags unbearably,
yet in retrospect
seems to have raced ahead.
As if I'd leapfrogged
some forgettable void.
In English, there are 16 tenses,
from past progressive
to simple present.
Such fine pedantry
by which to place ourselves
exactly.
But stranded on a desert isle
when you can only keep track of time
by the sound of waves
tick-tocking ashore,
the relentless sun
as it transits the sky,
it becomes what we make of it;
immaterial
and utterly subjective.
I don't want to romanticize
the endless waiting
of the wretched castaway,
but there is a kind of freedom
in being out of time,
indifferent to its passage
taking refuge in the mind.
Like an empty hourglass,
or the hands of a clock
turned back again and again,
an SOS in the sand
lasts only as long as the tide,
resetting time
until it stops making sense.
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