Book of Hours

i.
I don’t hold time
too close at hand.
I know minutes
are the brown leaves
of evergreens—sharp little
useless things, fallen;
I discard them
like fruit peels.
Never in knowing, but
slipping on the
mealy brown coils,
sensing it’s
time to go.

ii.
Time is a blenching bird
in the back yard of
the inaccurate.
It shivers and flinches, always
a moment out of reach, and
you beg to know
how the warm of its body,
how those feathers would feel
between your fingers.

(A pulsing thing,
smooth with the silk
of meaning never
to be caught.)

iii.
The face of time
is smooth with wear.
A shining silver circle,
a quarter with the visage
worn to dullness
from years in a
warm pocket.
When I come late I’ve been
polishing the shine,
illuminating
the gelatin print
of months and
years of
holding onto.

iv.
The opposite of gray
is gray. The opposite of time is
a swollen river in shifting autumn.
A lying child. Ash that floats on water,
the aching moan of
wet snow beneath
bare feet.

v.
Sometimes I can feel time
with its bare feet
folding and refolding itself
inside my stomach
because it means for me to.

vi.
The opposite of time is
time in negative,
time living
a life its own
without numbers
somewhere in Western Illinois
among the cornfields,
maybe sitting, maybe pacing,
always just
taking its time.