How to Measure Time {a #poem}
I swerved around a swallowtail today,
its goldblackblue mosaic translated
across the glass and gone.
Street’s curbed outline caught the corner of
my eye as the colorburst startled me to
noticing, awakened me to a sight just past
the neighbors.
A sudden glimpse of canines at their master’s
feet—heads anon, ears aperk—then they rose
and trotted on.
*****
What if darting visions, experience, growth
were not an arrow whizzing by in time but
instead layers that land over our lives
like a blanket? What might we make of it,
the mundane atop daysweeksmonths of
richness?
Years folding slowly, one event or view at a
time—like the memory of a butterfly’s sighting—
landing, not leaving, laying the bedrock on
which we build our days.
*****
This poem (the first I’ve written in a l o n g time) was inspired by one of Malcolm Guite’s recent “Spell in the Library” series speaking of time being, not a straight line shooting by as we watch from the sidelines, but more like the layers of a blanket, one over the other, building in time.
