“Time is a static in the mind.”—Malachi Black, poet
Timesea
In the days when there were bona fide summers
when months were loyal to the expected,
when they stayed more or less within their lanes,
December not copping the joys of July, for instance,
when seasons honored tradition and did not
insist on mukluks in June or ban January snow,
time (though always mercurial) made sense,
or at least we’d trimmed its arrogant sails
whose masts and spars, like antennae,
we trained to troll timesea for wind steady enough
to give clear chronometric reception —something to rely upon.
But time has always ebbed and flowed like tides, it fell
and rose random as waves, so we concocted clocks
to lock time’s fundamental pace, the regularity of its sine.
But time is simultaneously as un-pin-downable
as background noise, a universally evasive
static in the mind
.
Jim Culleny
7/4/20