Tag: time

Turning, Pt III (draft)

~ SamF

The afternoon holds just enough

Life and dying,

To be familiar

In the narrow, empty spaces

That keep to themselves

In a confusing mass of briars,

And dried or mildewed berries:

Take your pick.

While the shadowed visitors of place

Return home.

.

The day’s path gives a ride

Good sojourns,

Moving, really moving along.

And this time:

Like the knob of some old radio,

Cranked slowly one way,

Boisterous and fading

Again and again.

.

Nobody talks about this stuff,

Making for poor politics.

None, really.

Unless we can all turn askew,

Upwards. All of us.

.

‘Cause we all see it our own crooked ways.

.

And one more:

Don’t fall for the witching hour,

Telling you, this moment:

Some speck of time,

that could turn the day.

No. Don’t.

Just watch this time,

like it was back then.

The Way Summer Turned – Part II

~ SamF

Speaking softly now in a still lingering light

Measured in long peeks out the window,

Until the life of darkness

Resumes the ongoing day:

Slipping,

Stretching,

Into something else.

.

Some of us lost the light

Before we were even able

To sequester its sparkling splendor

In some imaginary pause.

.

I walked right past the bus!

.

That’s how it grabbed me:

Before I could even catch up to it

And after it was long gone.

.

Now cardboard afternoons,

To box the passage of days,

And the frayed edges of old towels

Hanging stiff along a sagging clothesline:

Barely swinging back and forth.

Enter left, exit hopefully (draft)

~ SamF

March, April, May

Those hideous months of spring

And dying.

Times to drink to oblivion

Or get sober

Because things have gotten that bad.

More than once.

.

Summer is just a known

Constant staleness, defying perpetuity.

And time of asking calendars

About the rules of a waiting game,

Measured in drought,

Day length,

And sometimes tomatoes.

.

Give me those 4 days in October,

September, November.

Doesn’t matter:

It’s when the counting ceases,

And the shadows come to stay.

Climate: part IV

~ SamF

Your voice,

Hoarse, crackled and thin,

From the still shadowed corner

Of a landscape, starving,

And touched by the end

Of a once great circle,

Now warped

And faded away from time.

.

Will you walk with me again?

Day Three at the Astronomy Office

~ SamF

The dense moments:

A perched and waiting infinity

like the slow approach

Of a December storm.

This will give way

To clusters of days

Grouping themselves into months and

somewhere listed in years and futility.

Some of these more relevant than others.

All this in hindsight, of course.

But all of them eventually get listed equally

Despite their distance from now,

And the patterns to deceive.

.

Maybe all these places and spaces are appropriately

Filed as leaves falling from trees,

As they play the light floating down,

Ghostly ballerinas of the wooded air.

Each one it’s own scratchy day

Wringing the counting out of us,

Collecting in the patches of light

And shadow.

.

Of course,

Back at the office,

all this started during the pragmatic era,

Which preceded the declining epoch,

Where the rusted pot of drought

Boiled dry, until the metal turned glowing blue

And this time of light appeared as some

Barefoot church-goer:

Enthralled and enthused,

Ready to shake, but still too worn and stiff

To let fall the remaining leaves.

The light still slides

~ SamF

But plays to a bad rhythm

A bad rhythm going down.

.

Again,

Some of this time might linger.

Mix.

Into the endless eddies of days

But is quickly lost

On the downhill slide.

.

One day, crazy boisterous

The next,

Of long slumber,

Or the deep haze

Cast across dry fields

And the aches fired by dust and wind.

.

Here the days slide with the light,

The rhythm of new times again.