Yes I would love to enter immediately
into its annular enchantments to live
each never-ending moment without reference to
any other in a glow of pure Emersonian wonder
among those ever-trendy paradoxes that are not
exactly lies so long as we can feel them
ticking in our hearts like the mechanisms
of so many blissful unexploded bombs
And yet I really think that time is nothing
but a clock a simple arbitrary agreement to meet
together somewhere at a quarter after six
It is a precise quantity of very fine sand
a spring of known strength that is wound up and
winds down-It is the school where we pay
attention to the inexorable and are made to write
one hundred million times I must learn to obey
What is time—It is a trap we spring
with a single breath and in whose teeth we share
a common cruel fate with everybody everywhere
The difference is only that some are reduced
to elegy and others are able to chew off a leg
and hobble off to crystal shores and ruby regions
where the spray still lingers in the middle of the air
and time that used to bother us does not
There if we are absolutely still we’ll hear
above the silence of the clocks a reassuring plash
as waters overflow the fountain’s brim
in the courtyard of an ordinary mosque whose pavevements now
do not disprove causality with rows of shoes
The doors are locked the worshippers dispersed
to wives and jobs—Eventually nobody believes
that noon is not the only reason for one o’clock
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