Another Time Problem
       

If I don't sleep I can't make good use of time—vireo-eyed, draggy, no synaptic arabesque, just plod, plod, plod. Time is no horse, more like the fish hook locked in my heel on the beach once and no one I passed had heard of pliers. When I don't sleep, I think about how we should be teaming up with the Dutch to build sea walls. The shelters I build on the coffee table with Leo feel hollow. He constructs "car homes" so tenderly. I want time to love something the way Leo loves cars. The scientist tells me our only hope is geologic time, says not to take the peopled dimension so seriously. "We are in for a rough 2000 years," he says, "a defining era in human history." We are the green flash on time's horizon. Here, in the northern hemisphere, leaves gust down in droves, sometimes in a single afternoon. All day, every day, erasures. I want to be the leaf that takes ten minutes to fall through the canopy of rain, to be more like water, breaking all the rules, sticking to itself, slowing time down despite science. The scientist admits time is subjective, but that how we see things affects nothing. We are tied to the track and the train is coming, even if we don't believe trains are real.

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Copyright © 2021 Gail Martin All rights reserved
from Disappearing Queen
Two Sylvias Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission