Time starts, then slows, while we slip bare feet
into the blue water cold beneath the dock,
while we forge words we need to interrupt,
while talk itself continues, in its own predicates.
To postpone the quantum predicate,
time joins time. In good time then, we eat.
If one hour proceeds, shared,
it maintains its own cell in time,
desk, paper, mind, forcing ahead and ahead the time.
We would prefer to challenge, day by day,
the trepid empty feeling of sensing where we are when—
the fulfilling confirmation
that we are in the only hour ever possible
in each single hour we dream and invest with breath.
The next hour need bring to hand
no more than a poem, or my share in it.
We aim to do the thing for good.
If we must do it over and over again—
we must and will and will—
we do it now, each try, and we do it for forever—
until the next time, only in order
to unite our stammered ages of dialogue—
each shared meeting, every simple meal,
each word, each gesture—and do it forever.
Until the next time beyond.
Any horizon. An uncircled habitat—
