[lost]
Dusty blackberry brambles ripen the air. It is August when the days forget their names. A month of Sundays and sunsets, August lazes on summer’s porch, fanning a breeze into being. In her letter to her soon-to-be-former husband Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote of August: In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else. In August, time loosens its buttons, some are lost.
[moments]
Night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I think of this line from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. And how some moments hummingbird while others nest like the chickadee out my window, endlessly chirping in a way that is meditative, unrestrained by time.
[slowed]Last night I read this in an essay by Hanif Abdurraqib: If you are lucky, sometimes minutes feel like entire generations fit within them. Like each of the three times I gave birth—and yes, those minutes actually spawned a whole generation—time slowed to the clock on the hospital wall’s tick, each timed breath and contraction. The birth marked to the minute. The creation of life a slow-motion experience.
As can be death. How the day emptied like a slow-draining bath the evening my father died. It pools in the basin all these years later. Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty, wrote T. S. Eliot.
[day by day]
When time smacks its head up against something major—birth, death, disaster—it slows as if concussed. Once I suffered a concussion that brought on amnesia. The month of August disappeared from the calendar of my seventeenth year like James Baldwin describes: Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended.
[coincidence]
I’m flying to a foreign city. Crossing nine time zones. Losing a night. Is it midnight, is it morning? On the plane I read a short story by Zadie Smith. Then, stroke of luck, hear her read it aloud today. Or did I? Perhaps it was imagined, her solid voice in my ear, a cadence I could fall asleep to. My friend keeps saying Ten hours and you’re in a foreign city, and it is a shock—being transported to a cobbled street corner, a woman adjusting her scarf in the window of a shop that’s sold jams since 1761, the street cleaner dragging his lime green brush along the walk. We had spoken of Basquiat just this morning and here at the café, a mural of his face. Someone painted two of his fingernails red, one black, anxiety tattooed above one brow. I am feeling anxious now. Suggestive? Or is it the generalized fear that permeates the air these days. Even here, an ocean and many time zones away from my fraught country. And now a lean man walks past, his glance a dead ringer for Basquiat.
[out of sync]
The friend I’m traveling with sleeps in while I rise early. Then rises early on the day I sleep past seven. We are learning each other’s rhythms. She eats less. I drink more coffee, more wine, more. She sleeps more. I sleep less.
[passing through]
The poet Jennifer Grotz writes that poems are meant to register what it feels like to pass through time when discussing her poem “Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City.” I think of her poem as I pass time in a foreign city. A city where I have spent the equivalent of three years, maybe more. Each stay accumulating layers of memory. They flicker. Collapsing decades.
[tense]
Sometimes in a poem, I change the tense to create distance. Off the page, absence arrives like a talkative houseguest, following me from room to room, offering to polish my grandmother’s silver, to press the clothes piled on the ironing board. If I speak in the present tense in my own voice, quiet and steady, will the absence disappear? Is time a form of distance?
[clocks]
I have taken to snapping photos of beautiful clocks—on buildings, in train stations, in cafés. At a flea market in the foreign city—tables of timepieces: desk clocks, wall clocks, watches, alarm clocks, seven travel clocks arrayed. My grandfather always arrived with his travel clock in a robin’s egg blue leather case. Now it travels with my mother. It has been to nearly every country in the world, ticking away, dawn to dusk to dawn. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting, wrote Haruki Murakami.
[nostalgia]
And then time’s gone, the day, the week—taking off like the last kid. Graduating into the distance. Leaving a trail of old toys to pick through, pack up, give away.
[end]
What would people look like / if we could see them as they are, / soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time? I’ve read these last lines of Ellen Bass’s poem “If You Knew” over and over. How it asks to see us humans—so alive in the prolonged act of dying. And to see the beauty of living in death’s thrall. Pinned against time, I ask to be seen in the present.
