And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

Another Word for Time

63 Another Word for Time We speak as people in motion speak, more sure of what’s behind us than ahead, but going anyway. Trying to see beyond the world we see, we see that seeing’s dangerous. Our props collapse. Religion, custom, law, the dream called government . . . Nothing sustains us but our eyes and what our eyes, by saying nothing, say. No wonder Timmerman could claim for all of us, “I’m more at home in subjects now, not countries.” Before the real frontiers, our passports are invalid. They tell us how we’re called but never who we are, and who we are’s the mystery. The pilgrim in us has no fixed address. He roams. He takes us with him when he goes. Encowled within a fuselage, we speed toward 64 a short tomorrow in another world. We land, speak languages we almost understand, and trust in strangers as the best of friends, and for a time they are. Years afterward we feel a bond with them so indestructible that we’re amazed. If they should die, we’d grieve for them like those old Cuban fishermen who grieved for Hemingway because he fished the gulf they fished and called them friends. With nothing else to offer him, they gave the bronze propellers of their very boats for melting to create his statue in the plaza of Cojimar . . . For us the best memorials are what we heard or read en route. “He’d old, but still in life.” “Nothing but heart attack kill Christophine, but why in that box she so swell up?” “Cruelty’s a mystery and a waste of pain.” “I like a dog that makes you think when you look at him.” 65 “El Cordobés es un hombre muy valiente.” Each word’s a time. Each time’s a place. Each place is where a time repeats itself because a word returns us there. Crisscrossing through the universe the way that lightning diagrams the sky, we’re all companions of the road at different altitudes. Here in my speeding house below the speeding stars, I’m turning into language from a pen while you’re confiding in some traveler you’ll never see again. The quiet bronze of words remembers us. It says we were, we are, we will be. ...