by Rosmarie Waldrop
1.
There is no evidence that we have a special sense. Of time. You don’t think it’s pressing as
you sit on a sidewalk in Providence. And let your inner ear. Regulate your equilibrium.
At the edge of your eye, a black cat wanders among legs. You watch swallows drift high in
the breeze as if the force of gravity did not exist. And a shimmer of sun through branches
deepens to a memory. Of waking in a small garden. Among buildings that no longer exist.
2.
Summer has arrived in a strawberry, sweet, juicy. As long as you feel its flesh on your
tongue you’re unaware how. One minute inches into the next. But how could you observe
awareness anyway? Or, for that matter, a thought? It grows in you, not as a sensation. (Nor like a baby or tumor.) An experience that you can’t hold on to. Any more than to the smell of lilac. Though it soothes emptiness.
3.
You can heed the way shadows grow. In the afternoon. Whereas you can’t focus on forgetting, say, my name. Not a seqence of discrete acts like brushing it off. Your teeth. Another process more elusive than light fading. Into mere spaciousness where you don’t hear my voice. Pass through the air. Which you breathe unawares while your thoughts run. To coffee like an express on its tracks.
4.
You call it instinct. That you want to make the word your 4th dimension. A way to seize the now and keep it. From being gone almost before it is. To live in a continuous present, like the cat that rubs her chin along your leg. Or Gertrude Stein. Or like that distant waking.
Into light made complex by cherry branches cutting across it. So many leaf edges. Spread
as widely as the phenomena of thinking.
5.
Only in time is there room enough to think, you say. And order another strawberry tart.
But thinking (alas) does not happen in front of your eyes, with a clear horizon. It spreads
its light. Like sun behind a cloud. From no visible point of origin. And at no moment does
the question do fish think come up. For air. Which is cooling. Because it’s late afternoon,
and the shadows of houses are longer.
6.
The shadows have a bluish cast. But the cat’s fur radiates tremendous desire. And how can we see time as it is when we treat it like a thing? To spend or lose while trying to hold on? To its perpetual passing? Like the sheen on the Seekonk sweeping ducks and swans
toward the Bay. While we cling to the bank and count on a yield of air. Meanwhile the
senses grow dull. The environment erodes. And Edith Piaf sings je ne regrette rien.
7.
We don’t (like the ancient Egyptians). Vary the length of the hour. By how much daylight
there is to be divided by twelve. And though your mouth is full of pastry (hallelujah)
words are not. A translation of something that was there before. Not as your tart is of
berry, flour, eggs. You try to find the place inside you where words come into being, to
wrest from them what one might get. From a relationship. Even in a foreign tongue. The
cat in full possession keeps the pigeons at bay.
8.
While our conversation flows on. (Along with planets, the Seekonk, and the meaning of
words.) Physicists are making the most determined attempts to circumvent the asymmetry.
Of past and future. Just as your mind does as it returns. To that overlay of intense light
and leaf. In the garden of your childhood. Do you feel a sudden deepening of warmth?
On your navel? Does it make you think of the word “love”?
9.
A sentence with the word “time” in it already contains a shadow. Of the soul leaving the
body. And at the word “leaving” a bird (or an insect?) rises. On a diagonal. Toward the
flock of its feather. Seen darkly through the glass of otherworldly ideas. Just as again and
again you think what we experience as time. Is only the outside. While hidden within the
deer and the antelope play. Not to mention those vague creatures, our memories.
10.
The antidote to such speculations might be a complete inventory. Of the things present in
the present. Busses, cars, sun, pigeons, cat, table, spider, coffee cup etc. But where then do we locate feeling? In our breast or facial muscles? In the gestures we make with our voice?
(Like lucidity gathered from the surface of phenomena?) Or in that sunlight through the
cherry tree that is etched into your brain? Though that small body is no longer possible.
And of the garden nothing remains.
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