Bookmarker tag: topic/the-passage-of-time (9 notes)

Blackboard covered with a dust
 of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
  wormed by turbulence: the rod glides

and the vet narrates shadows
 I can’t quite force into shape:
  His kidneys might . . . the spleen appears . . .

I can’t see what he sees, and so
 resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy
  blurred with slow comings

and goings, that far away. The doctor
 makes appreciative noises,
  to encourage me;

he praises Beau’s stillness.
 I stroke the slope beneath
  those open, abstracted eyes,

patient, willing to endure whatever
 we deem necessary, while the vet
  runs along the shaved blonde

Today I’m herding the two old dogs
 into the back of the car,
  after the early walk, wet woods:

Beau’s generous attention must be
 brought into focus, gaze pointed
  to the tailgate so he’ll be ready to leap,

and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
 needs me to lift first his forepaws
  and then, placing my hands

under his haunches, hoist the moist
 black bulk of him into the wagon,
  and he growls a little

before he turns to face me,
 glad to have been lifted—
  And as I go to praise them,

as I like to do, the words
 that come from my mouth,
  from nowhere, are Time’s children,

as though that were the dearest thing
 a person could say.
  Why did I call them by that name?

They race this quick parabola
 faster than we do, as though
  it were a run in the best of woods,

run in their dreams, paws twitching
 —even asleep they’re hurrying.
  Doesn’t the world go fast enough?

We’re caught in this morning’s
 last-of-April rain, the three of us
  bound and fired by duration

—rhythm too swift for even them
 to hear, though perhaps we catch
 a little of that rush and ardor

—furious poetry!—
 the sound time makes,
  seeing us through.

Big blocks of ice
—clear cornerstones—
chug down a turning belt
toward the blades of a wicked,

spinning fan; scraping din
of a thousand skates and then
powder flies out in a roaring
firehose spray of diamond dust,

and the film crew obscures
the well-used Manhattan snow
with a replica of snow.

Trailers along the edge of the Square,
arc lamps, the tangled cables
of a technical art, and our park’s

a version of itself. We walk here
daily, the old dogs and I glad
for the open rectangle of air

held in its frame of towers,
their heads held still and high
to catch the dog run’s rich,

acidic atmosphere, whitened faces
—theirs and mine—lifted toward gray
branches veining the variable sky.

Today we’re stopped at the rim:
one guy’s assigned the task
of protecting the pristine field

a woman will traverse
—after countless details are worried
into place—at a careful angle,

headed toward West Fourth.
They’re filming The Hours,
Michael’s novel, a sort of refraction

of Mrs. Dalloway. Both books
transpire on a single June day;
that’s the verb; these books do

breathe an air all attention,
as if their substance were a gaze
entirely open to experience, eager

to know—They believe
the deepest pleasure is seeing
and saying how we see,

even when we’re floored
by spring’s sharp grief, or a steady
approaching wave of darkness.

In the movie version, it’s winter;
they’re aiming for a holiday release,
and so must hasten onward.

Someone calls out Background!
and hired New Yorkers begin
to pass behind the perfect field,

a bit self-conscious, skaters
and shoppers too slow to convince,
so they try it again, Clarissa passing

the sandblasted arch
bound in its ring of chain-link,
monument glowing gray against the gray

A little less now in the world to love.

Taxi on Bleecker, dim afternoon, after
a bright one’s passing, after the hours
in stations and trains, blur of the meadows

through dull windows, fitful sleep,
heading home, and now the darkness inside
the cab deeper than anything a winter afternoon

could tender. Nothing stays, the self
has no power over time, we’re stuck
in a clot of traffic, then this: a florist shop,

where something else stood yesterday,
what was it? Do things give way that fast?
PARADISE FLOWERS, arced in gold

on the window glass, racks and rows
of blooms, and an odd openness on the sidewalk,
and—look, the telltale script of cables

inking the street, trailers near, and Martian lamps,
and a lone figure in a khaki coat poised
with a clutch of blooms while they check her aspect

through the lens: Clarissa, of course,
buying the flowers herself.
I take it personally. As if,

no matter what, this emblem persists:
a woman went to buy flowers, years ago,
in a novel, and was entered

by the world. Then in another novel,
her double chose blooms of her own
while the blessed indifferent life

of the street pierced her, and now
here she is, blazing in a dim trench
of February, the present an image

reduced through a lens, a smaller version
of a room in which love resided.
Though they continue, shadow and replica,

copy and replay, adapted, reduced,
reframed: beautiful versions—a paper cone of asters,
golden dog nipping at a glove—fleeting,

and no more false than they are true.

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone’s now. Memory’s furious land.

“Oh, I go out,” I said too quickly, as a joke. “I’m constantly out.” No, of course I didn’t hang out in bars. I had been in my converted garage for the past fifteen years, working at the table with one short leg. And when I had gone out, it had been to attend my own events or the events and openings and premieres of my friends and peers. The bar was having trivia night and people were excited about that. They had time for that. I hadn’t planned on becoming this rarefied; I had just spent every waking moment trying to get across what life seemed like to me, only allowing undeniable things—the child, a bad case of the flu, hunger and thirst—to take me away from this trying. And apparently time had, meanwhile, been passing—great swaths of it, whole decades. Indoor smoking had been banned and this young man was leading me to a table outside. The air was perfectly warm. We drank tequila and I wondered if the upside-down triangle of his upper body—his bony but broad shoulders narrowing down to his small waist—was perhaps a classic proportion with a kind of ancient resonance. Something to do with Michelangelo’s drawings or Da Vinci or whoever it was. The Da Vinci code. Like if you measured the angles of his upper body would you discover those same measurements in the Bible or inscribed on a Greek vase and would they also correspond, if scaled up, to a larger, cosmological measurement, perhaps between stars? Celestial music—what was that? If I’d been at home, working, I’d pause to look it up. But, stunningly, I wasn’t at home working and I wouldn’t look it up and I didn’t really want to look anything up, ever again. We were sipping our drinks and talking; I was trying to explain what my work meant to me. How life, usually so frustratingly scattered and elusive, came under my spell; I could name each thing, no matter how obscure, and it would open to me as if it loved me. Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control. I said this last part half standing, with my arms grasping the air as if to catch a bird. I really got why people drank to unwind after work, this was great. I tried again to guess his secret passion.

Government officials come to the narrator’s workplace to warn his students of various sects operating contrary to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the most dangerous of which is the mysterious Picketists, whose secret sign is an extended hand with an insect in its palm. Through Caty, one of his fellow teachers and a Picketist convert, he learns of their nighttime meetings, where they dress in black and march on local hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, carrying signs reading Down with Aging!, Down with Cancer, No to Eternal Disappearance! It is an ongoing, recurrent, futile protest against the realization that:

you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person you see coming out of the factory gates in a Méliès film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead.

Flora had taken out of a drawer an old sweater which had belonged to her grandfather. She laid it on the kitchen table, ironing it with her palms. In the old days, she explained, the women of these islands used to tell stories with their knitting. The pattern of this jersey showed that her grandfather had come from Eriksay, while its details, its decorations, told of fishing and faith, of the sea and the sand. And this series of zigzags across one shoulder — these here, look — represented the ups and downs of marriage. They were, quite literally, marriage lines.

Zigzags. Like any newly married couple, they had exchanged a glance of sly confidence, sure that for them there would be no downs — or at least, not downs like those of their parents, or those of friends who were already making the usual stupid, predictable mistakes. They would be different, they would be different from everyone who had ever got married before.

Barbara is the name of the waitress at the Arkade. She’s tall, and taller when she puts her hair up. Two coffees and two glasses of Rotkäppchen, please, Barbara. A celebration. It’s their third 11th day, their trimensual anniversary, and if Katharina had a wish, then she would wish that fate never ran out of elevens. Nine years, three years. How long will she and Hans be good for? Is what they have nothing but a so-called affair? Will he be sitting with someone else in ten years’ time, showing off a snapshot of her, Katharina, and saying: that was Katharina, she was my lover? How to endure the way that the present trickles down moment by moment and becomes the past? So why did he show her the photos? Of course he’s been with other women, he’s been around that much longer. Even she’s had three or four others, plus Gernot. What makes her so jealous is the secrecy around the other women, the trouble Hans must have gone to to keep each relationship going: rubbing the lipstick off a wineglass after a meeting in his apartment, or telling Ingrid, we were working late in the office, using her hairdresser’s appointment for a phone call or taking advantage of a moment at night when the wife’s gone to bed to whisper into the telephone: O darling, O beautiful, O sweetheart. The way he does now, with me. Little Ludwig was revolted by it, she recalls. And isn’t he right to be? And now she’s a part of this tissue of deceit. And even thinks of these little treacheries of Hans’ as a distinction. Not long ago, when Hans went to the cinema with Ludwig, she sat three rows behind them, just to have some proximity to the man she loves. In the general crush when everyone filed out, Hans brushed against her hand.

The government reacted forcefully to the commotion, but at least no shots were fired, thinks Katharina. Could it be because the so-called counterrevolutionaries reminded the ancients in power of themselves when they were young idealists? The passage of time. Strange, she thinks, that a crime is called a trespass.

“Hold my hand,” he said. She considered the hand but did not. He moved his head toward her. The flesh slid on the jaw.

She waited. She smiled at him. Buildings were sun-shocked in the corners of her eyes.

“Ah,” he said. A warmth moved into his face. The almost joke in it had returned. “She won’t be forced.”

“Correct,” she said. But she thought, Oh, you murderous girl, hello. I haven’t seen you for so long.

“Please,” he said. “Mathilde. Take the cold hand of a dying man.”

And then she took his hand and pressed it to her chest with both of hers and held it there. What didn’t need to be said stayed unspoken. He fell asleep and the nurse came out on angry tiptoes. Mathilde went into the apartment, sterile and tasteful, and didn’t linger at the pictures she once knew too well for the ferocity with which she stared at them, counting the minutes until she could leave. Later, she walked through the cold shadows and blaze of concentrated afternoon light that poured between the buildings, and she couldn’t stop; she could barely breathe; it felt too good to be on those coltish terrified legs once more, not to know, once more, where she was going.