Meditações - The hands fell off my watch in the night

Time Problem

The problem

of time.          Of there not being  

enough of it.

 

My girl came to the study

and said Help me;

I told her I had a time problem  

which meant:

I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes.  

Numbers hung in the math book  

like motel coathangers. The Lean  

Cuisine was burning

like an ancient city: black at the edges,  

bubbly earth tones in the center.  

The latest thing they’re saying is lack  

of time might be

a “woman’s problem.” She sat there  

with her math book sobbing—

(turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers  

dangle in little nooses)

Hawking says if you back up far enough  

it’s not even

an issue, time falls away into

'the curve' which is finite,

boundaryless. Appointment book,  

soprano telephone—

(beep End beep went the microwave)

 

The hands fell off my watch in the night.

I spoke to the spirit

who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing  

they invented. Had wakened from a big

dream of love in a boat

No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face  

lived for months in my dresser,

no arrows

for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio  

nose         (before the lie)

left in the center;            the watch

didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I.

My girl was doing

her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked

toward black, then into the white

insignia)                  I was grading papers,

heard her call from the laundry room:  

Mama?

Hawking says there are two

types of it,

real and imaginary (imaginary time must be  

like decaf), says it’s meaningless

to decide which is which

but I say: there was tomorrow-

and-a-half

when I started thinking about it; now  

there’s less than a day. More

done. That’s

the thing that keeps being said. I thought  

I could get more done as in:

fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller  

archon, then push-push-push

the tired-tired around the track like a planet.  

Legs, remember him?

Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .  

Hawking says

there are little folds in time

(actually he calls them wormholes)

but I say:

there’s a universe beyond

where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. .

Push us out in the boat and leave time here—        

 

(because: where in the plan was it written,  

You’ll be too busy to close parentheses,

the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water,  

even the caterpillar will hurry past you?

Pulled the travel alarm

to my face: the black

behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark  

from being ruined. Opened  

the art book

—saw the languorous wrists of the lady

in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning  

gently. The glove

(just slightly—but still:)  

“aghast”;

opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed  

into a fourth dimension  

but I say

space thought it up, as in: Let’s make

a baby space, and then

it missed. Were seconds born early, and why  

didn’t things unhappen also, such as

the tree became Daphne. . .

 

At the beginning of harvest, we felt

the seven directions.

Time did not visit us. We slept

till noon.

With one voice I called him, with one voice  

I let him sleep, remembering

summer years ago,

I had come to visit him in the house of last straws  

and when he returned

above the garden of pears, he said

our weeping caused the dew. . .

 

I have borrowed the little boat

and I say to him Come into the little boat,  

you were happy there;

 

the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out  

onto the pond,

or onto the reflection of the pond,  

whichever one is eternal.

Brenda Hillman