Loose Sugar

Time Problem

Time Problem The problem of time. Of there not being enough of it. My girl came to the study and said Help me; I told her I had a time problem which meant: I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes. Numbers hung in the math book like motel coathangers. The Lean Cuisine was burning like an ancient city: black at the edges, bubbly earth tones in the center. The latest thing they’re saying is lack of time might be a “woman’s problem.” She sat there with her math book sobbing— (turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers dangle in little nooses) Hawking says if you back up far enough it’s not even an issue, time falls away into ‘the curve’ which is finite, boundaryless. Appointment book, soprano telephone— (beep End beep went the microwave) The hands fell off my watch in the night. I spoke to the spirit who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing they invented. Had wakened from a big dream of love in a boat— No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face lived for months in my dresser, no arrows 77 for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio nose (before the lie) left in the center; the watch didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I. My girl was doing her gym clothes by herself; (red leaked toward black, then into the white insignia) I was grading papers, heard her call from the laundry room: Mama? Hawking says there are two types of it, real and imaginary (imaginary time must be like decaf), says it’s meaningless to decide which is which but I say: there was tomorrowand -a-half when I started thinking about it; now there’s less than a day. More done. That’s the thing that keeps being said. I thought I could get more done as in: fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller archon, then push-push-push the tired-tired around the track like a planet. Legs, remember him? Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us . . . Hawking says there are little folds in time (actually he calls them wormholes) but I say: there’s a universe beyond where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs . . . Push us out in the boat and leave time here— (because: where in the plan was it written, You’ll be too busy to close parentheses, the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water, even the caterpillar will hurry past you? 78 Pulled the travel alarm to my face: the black behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark from being ruined. Opened the art book —saw the languorous wrists of the lady in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning gently. The glove (just slightly—but still:) “aghast”; opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed into a fourth dimension but I say space thought it up, as in: Let’s make a baby space, and then it missed. Were seconds born early, and why didn’t things unhappen also, such as the tree became Daphne . . . At the beginning of harvest, we felt the seven directions. Time did not visit us. We slept till noon. With one voice I called him, with one voice I let him sleep, remembering summer years ago, I had come to visit him in the house of last straws and when he returned above the garden of pears, he said our weeping caused the dew . . . I have borrowed the little boat and I say to him Come into the little boat, you were happy there; the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out onto the pond, or onto the reflection of the pond, whichever one is eternal— 79 ...