Four Poems on Time, by Louis Gallo

 

WHAT

What I’ve found, gained, accumulated,
what I’ve lost, what fragmented,
disintegrated, what ceased its allure,
what increased in value, what decreased,
what I gave away, what was stolen,
what stapled itself in my mind, what
flowed away, what brought pleasure,
what pain, what like confetti
exploded in every direction, what
remained stolid as an anvil, what
touched me, what disinterested me,
what my forebears saved, what
they threw out, what they passed on,
what I remembered, forgot, what
remains today . . . ruins maybe--
or some splendid heritage of this
and that and this and that and this . . .
you know, the leftover confetti,
the festoons, echoes and shadows.

 

THE EMPTINESS OF TIME

How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch
or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing
away?

Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still
messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none . . .
                        --Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Leaden Echo . . .

They tell us that the Big Bang, a “fluctuation
in the void,” created it along with everything else
as well as the subsequence-after-the-before,
that it doesn’t exist on the quantum level,
may even flow (streak?) backwards or maybe,
imagine, stand still in static paralysis,
a Grecian Urn without the urn, a zone
of only Now (circa 200 milliseconds)
though how can one discuss Now in Notime?
when now becomes a kind of Never,
Never, a Then, since Then requires
A former Now, imagine, and what about
Forever and Nevermore (quoth the Raven)—

no, if Now exists even in paltry milliseconds
there must be Forever, right?  because what
could become before or after Now except
Forever, yet who can fathom 
much less forgive Forever?
though it must exist, for if not, then nada
exists, and I don’t mean the Nada (that Void)
they tell us existed as wave-potentiality
before Everything, before that freaky fluctuation
crashed the party for good, (well, “for good”
is a relative concept, and Someday the entire shebang
will peter out and we can only assume TIME
—what a skinny old reprobate—with it or,
and what difference does it make? without.)
its Fulness never happened, once or ever,
a pipedream, though for a hazy spell, the figs
and aperitifs seemed splendidly enough—
almost convincing us that all speculation
devolves into legerdemain of the spooky neurons
and dendrites and what’s the other one?

 

UNSPILLED MILK

Keep it in the glass bottle
the milkman left on your porch
way back before you were born
when things were done passionately.

Thing is, I hate the taste of milk,
always have, makes me gag,
but I crave its symbolic value
and slurp it up or down when I can.

For milk, say the poets, is heaven,
that old milk of paradise,
the Great Mother, you, a babe
at the breast of all breasts.

For milk, say the nutritionists,
is a whole food, complete, perfect
unless of course soured
by regret and wrath and angst.

So why does it taste so god-awful,
a spiritual anti-nectar so to speak?
Why do I throw up when I drink it?
Ah, must be a sign
since everything is a sign.

Allergic to Eden perhaps?
Depends on what Eden we’re talking about.
I want the one that’s here and now—
but forever.

 

SHELL

When my youngest daughter sobbed
over the seashell she’d crushed,
her heart shedding time against my chest,
I plucked each jagged bit from the grass
and promised super glue to weld the thing
whole, and slid the pieces into a pigeonhole.

Each night when she asked about the glue
I said things were fairly hectic
but pretty soon I’d find that glue.
The days, of course, lurched, came apart
like the shell.  Both cars needed repairs,
the hot water heater split in two,
a roofer never showed up,
our bathtub spigot spewed like a geyser,
the grass refused to mow itself . . . .

Soon my daughter forgot about the shards
though they never budged from their lodge
in the old post office rack on my desk.
She no longer asked about glue.
Truth is, the shell no longer mattered
even as it began to reassemble and tighten
around me like some calcified parenthesis.
I felt it wedge shut and sink back into the sea,
thirsty, yearning for fusion with its own past.
Salt coated to my lips with tiny barbs.
I sucked bright minerals
into the pure amniotic gel of myself.

And now, late, as light from my desk lamp
envelops me like another shell,
and moonlight suffuses the house and neighborhood
and the great astral spheres subsume us all,
I sit with fragments and a tube of glue
and try to mend what cannot be mended.
This is dangerous glue, fuses with skin and bone,
hardens the blood.  You must dab with caution
only on the right edges.  Some bits are no larger
than specks of thread and my fingers too clumsy
to ease them into place.

But I think the sea has chastened me.
I don’t mind how long it takes--years, a lifetime.
My daughter will have her shell restored,
the fractured token of a day when she stepped
out of our backyard into the future,
where nothing needs reconstitution,
and I floated ghostly toward the beginning,
another kind of future, piecemeal,
patched with hindsight.