Moments

There are 1440 minutes in a day.

The nurse tells me my heart beats

80 times per minute – 115,200 a day.

So many moments, exacting products of distance

multiplied by the charge of absent love.

* Though a “moment” is an inexact measure of time, in physics, it is something that can be calculated using a formula.           

Snow Time

Marking the day by the piling snow.

Breakfast dusted the grass and speckled sidewalks.

Lunch soup, and a blanketed picnic table.

By tea time, pillows on lawn chairs.

Night baffled and warm, a world asleep.

 

At Fourteen

At fourteen, I thought less about the future
and, unaware of Buddhism, lived in the moment.
Even a day was usually unplanned, spontaneous,
open to what the universe had planned for me.

If life is like a sonnet, the turn occurred when
the future became my focus and the present
rushed by out of control, and the past
became nostalgia, a read book fondly remembered.

At fourteen, I believed, without proof, in eternity.
The days unfolded unbidden and I was content
in thinking at some point I would be able to see

That fourteen-year-old’s future is my present,
slipping away from what I wanted it to be,
and even partially my past, now already spent.

Voyageur du Temps

 

I launch the time machine by opening

this case of photographs locked against time

present and future. Even places (Newark, Paris)

frozen sepia and white 100 years removed

marveling at light and air from 2017.

 

Time Stopped

 

The battery in my watch is dead,

so all day it has been 10:15.

The hands reclining, head up and napping.

At noon, I glanced at its face –

time for coffee, or time for bed.

 

Fever Time

Waking in a feverish afternoon and thinking,

“It’s much too early to get up.”

Realizing the sun is somehow now misplaced,

rising in the west, I weakly stand.

I’m a sundial gnomon. My shadow warped.