Coming to Terms with Another New Year

As the year dwindles and falters, I am constantly thinking of time and mortality, the finiteness of everything. How fitting I should happen upon this beautifully sad and easily relatable poem. As the year closes, I vow to make the most of time.

Time Problem 

By Brenda Hillman

 

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