Archive 05/17/09 - (2)

   

Time-Telling

                                                                  

When resettling myself up here, in this northern clime,

Be it for however many ephemeral days,

I'm disinclined to strap my watch, on my left wrist.

 

I prefer having time tell me all that it knows

About water spirits, squalls, migrating clouds,

Pileated woodpeckers boring into trunks of majestic red pines,

 

Woods dense with decomposing trees from winter's griefs

And greening leaves, ferns, and mosses

Heralding the burgeoning new growth of another springtide,

 

Rather than trying to tell time a thing or two, myself,

About human dimensions and doings cloaked in tricks

I just might have up my wrist watch's sleeve.

 

By now, grown old, at sixty-eight,

While well realizing I'm a mere pup, in nature's eyes,

What I've come to understand, if anything wise,

 

Is that existence and its ubiquitous coeval

Are measured in seasons, cycles, phases, breaths, and deaths,

Not by the beacon-light sweep of a secondhand,

 

Are calculated by instincts, intimations of change on the air,

Shifts of the lake's surface, variations in bird calls,

Not by numbers on a clock's face but by the beats of a heart.

                                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

05/17/09 - (2)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
       

 

 
   
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