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