Time

All that happens happens

in the hollow

mouth

open mid-vow

knowing

only song will do

what an empty cave needs

done, drone

that seeds to fill

one space and then that

space’s space, what

are we made

of if

not chants.

Sun slumping up

the stucco, cat chewing

her tail clean, nimbi

darkening the fallen

leaves leatherlike, I make

voice, voice, voice, voices

like a fist

on thinking’s door

a fistula

wrapping abstraction

and binding it to what, morning

sickness, the lathed light

now flying through branches

made sinister

by season, a crook

in the amygdala’s grey

ministry and all

I see is a circling murder

above the antenna

that replaced the weathervane.

All I see is one

millionth

percent of the earth

at once. Chance.

I give you the fingers

of my hand

like I was giving you broken

beige rulers.
 

Credit

Copyright © 2013 by Chris Martin. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on May 10, 2013. 

About this Poem

"In the midst of reading Philip Whalen's great selected Decompressions, I came across this line: 'Everything between time.' Ever since I've been obsessively writing poems all called TIME. This particular TIME partakes in one of my other obsessions, the life of the late hominid, which goes hairily on within us."
—Chris Martin