THE GIFTS OF TIME

9 5 R T H E G I F T S O F T I M E D A V I D M A S O N To stand in the kitchen high up in the trees watching a sapling sway, the canopy of leaves and needles stirred by an undersea, and stare, a mug of co√ee in the hand, is all of time. No necessary task impels a rush to dress and find the keys. Decades have served for that. It’s time to breathe. Time also for a long gray ship to turn and for a young man standing on the bridge to wonder if that distant speck is bird or continent. The young man, older now, can hear the heartbeat of an ailing girl. He moves the stethoscope, tells her to breathe, and knows the murmur is her leaking blood, and he is only one, and in the time it takes to breathe he too is gone forever. He too is like the stir of swaying trees, the muddy cli√s eroded by the surf. Stand here and listen to the trees and know their generation too will fall away. The cli√s will fall away. The voices die. ≤ There was another ship, another time, but going nowhere. It steamed both day and night. It made quite a business of making clouds. The sky poured from its stack, its boilers the same, and the ship’s hull tugged at cables and lines 9 6 Y lashed to a gravel bulkhead by the road. It tugged like a leashed dog with boundless hope but never left the shore, that cloudy ship with laborers who strove inside the hull. It rained inside. The men were always wet, the women too, working wet, and wet when they quit work and stepped out to the clouds exhaled from cigarettes they cupped in hands, talking of food they would like to eat again and letters they would like to read, dry-eyed. They too felt time rising from the gray stack. Time is the kitchen high up in the trees and time is the cloudy ship, time is the shore. The people hadn’t known the time before. Only when it slowed and swayed and clouded out, only when the co√ee in the hand went cool could anyone be sure they’d touched the hours or the year of gull cries from an open throat. A current stirs the trees like tidal grass. Stand in the kitchen looking out to sea through stands of waving limbs and feel the wind, the leaking vessels of the blood go down. ≤ No one can make up time. The sea would laugh, the crowded rocks whisper among themselves. The co√ee has gone cold. The names are gone. They are another generation gone. The room is time, the room is out of time. The fissured road will fall into the waves. The ruined millionaire will watch his house tip like a sandbox toy and slide away. A colony of ants will have its say remembered by the beetle rolling dung. An old man dances, knowing he is young. A woman dances in the breaking day. ...