Someone Asks Me to Consider Time

Kant says time is neither event nor thing.

Well, I think. That’s that.

But then Teresa calls.

She’s found my old letters.

There are dead dogs in them, old boyfriends;

the miscarriage is happening

(has happened)

and I have to catch a plane.

The plane has      (not yet)

taken off.

Sundials, T squares,

heartbeats, and the equinox.

In places of worship, incense burns.

All to mark no thing.

Here, wind moves water in one direction,

then another. Some mornings,

nothing ripples, not leaves,

not iridescence on birdwing, beetle back.

Some mornings,

both: stillness, unrest.

Last season’s loon calls.

And sometimes? I can’t remember the lake

where I first heard that sound,

though the vision of it rises

through a paint-flecked pane.

On my morning walk: a hawk

perched on a telephone wire above

what used to be a hayfield:

rusted New Holland baler,

bobolinks and meadowlarks

saved from the mower.

That was a generation ago,

dead farmers, dead cows.

Now

is not the time,

moles, voles, mice,

to dart into the light.

Nothing stops in stillness

except solstice

when the sun stands still in declination.

I should tell someone this,

that we are not propelled beyond a moment

of observation, even loss, into something else:

field edge, lakeside, motherhood.

But that, instead, we are always

on our way.

On my return, the wire’s empty.

The hawk has hunted or not,

is sated

or continues,

hungry.

Hunger, at least, returns.

Once, in different water,

my daughters waded naked

after mussels. Appendages,

these daughters were. I was

accustomed to the creases

behind their knees

where I kept their pulse.

Keep these, too: ships’ bells and steeple chimes,

an hourglass, the pharaoh’s water clock.

Now, on a floating dock,

my daughters sun themselves, swing limbs

above water that soon enough

will be ice.

These days, you can lift saliva

off the back of a stamp,

determine who licked it.

And that woman?

That sender?

She will have stopped

and she will

not yet

have stopped        and she will still be

bleeding.