Relativity - Jan 30 2021

 

Relativity

Jan 30 2021

I remember killing time.

As if it were an offence against the living

a brief rehearsal of death.

There was also saving time,

that clock-watching non-stopping toe-tapping rush,

as if, in the end

I could get it back.

And most of all, there was the fullness of time.

All the aspirations, good intentions, and best-laid plans

that, in the fullness of time

I was sure would be realized.

But time is not full.

It empties out

like sand from an hourglass,

and too soon

you find you've run out.

A wrong step

black ice

a bad set of brakes,

a tiny stretch of DNA

that multiplies

goes renegade.

And despite the tick-tock

of the mantle clock

is not the constant it appears.

I'm sure of this,

because I remember when we were together

how fast time went;

as if the days were too short,

as if we'd been spending time

like debtors kiting cheques.

And, looking back, how slow;

when our lives were so full

that if time hadn't stretched

it would have overflowed.

I've written before about the subjectivity of time: the irony that the faster it feels in the moment, the slower it seems in retrospect. And vice versa.

But this poem only landed there by accident. What I really wanted to say when I set out is all in the first stanza: the idea that killing time is the worst kind of failure, a terrible waste of our short and precious lives. Yet how often have we killed time? How often invoked this phrase without really contemplating its full implication?

After that, it was a short step to playing with “saving” time, “the fullness of time”, and “spending” time. And then, the inconstancy of time's passage, in the moment as well as memory.

Is the ending too unexpected, too much of a shift in tone? I ask this because while there is an undercurrent of regret that runs through the poem, there is no hint of romance. So in seeming to come out of nowhere, I wonder if this might strike the reader as a bit of emotional manipulation.