The Time of Space

Photo courtesy of: ‘Time’ by graceindirain – Flickr

‘Keeping’ Time seems to be a necessity with us…up to a point. We say time marches on…relentless…like an engine on tracks made of cause and effect. But it is space that allows time to endow. And when OUR space opens, time presents more…even what had been deemed impossible.

We manipulate time, while lamenting our slavery to it, for instance, in the practice of advancing clocks during summer months so that evening daylight lasts an hour longer, while sacrificing normal sunrise times, and adjust them backward in the autumn to standard time. But it is we who have been born of time…we ARE time…

Here are two interesting perspectives on time…

My friend Michael Gray said…

What an uneventful life in time the citizens of Tucson, Arizona must live. With no Spring Forward or Fall Back requiring them to talk with their clocks and phones, how do they keep from trudging straight ahead on the tracks of linear time, looking neither to right nor left, neither above nor below? This morning, I had to change six time pieces and verify that another four had already harkened to an atomic voice in the sky. Later today, my wife and I will visit her mother who needs a big faced clock to remind her what day it is and when the hour for mealtime rolls around. Wait–“rolls around”? Perhaps the train of daily interests and concerns also knows another kind of time, one that fosters a field of flowers in spring and sets loose armadas of spinning leaves upon the autumn winds . . .

Time Change
By Ken McKeon

Back in a sec, love.

That’s what Hank hollered
As he slammed the screen door shut,
About a thousand years ago,
Most likely more,
Long before the barnacles
Crusted up the bathtub,
Before here slipped away to there,
And the walruses rolled up
On our pool’s decking,

And he hasn’t been seen since,
And Martha is wondering aloud
About the time change,
About how it was
That the lava stopped flowing,
And the silence began
To tear away at her dreams
Of how life used to be,
So much so

That the sky itself frayed,
And the gulls
Were marooned mid-flight,
Though their irresistible wings
Kept on beating on,
Those birds got nowhere fast,

And we watched them like kites,
Stationary and madly fluttering,
But all their squawking
Transmuted into tunes,
And the tunes
Rearranged themselves
Into colorful wings,
And they became our butterflies,
We held them in our watches,
This was far better than time,

We knew that,
And so did Hank,
He had been waiting for
The second hand
To shift one notch,
But it never did

And he was left with rainbows,
And he never died.