Friday, May 08, 2009

Time in the Rocky Places

Time passes strangely when you're on the road. I swear that earlier in this road trip, I lost an hour that I can't account for. I don't know what happened, or where it went. The past few days, under continuously grey gloomy rainy skies, I've lost my sense of direction, and of time. Your subjective sense of time either rushes too fast or slows to a crawl so slow you feel like you have an eon between noticing what is happening and when you need to react to it. Stretching and compressing, time moves strangely.

move time to move time to strange move strange action early to bed strange to rise fast or slow to bed to rise and rain everywhere falling everywhere equally on all the living and the dead

a thousand eyes from the cliffs of the stone people
a hundred kelp strands walking between mafic dikes
intruding into pink granite batholith black aisles of lines
gulls sleeping by the ledges

Time passes without being noticed or noticing. I know that I've lost time, swearing for an hour in unaccountable frustrations, to unanswered questions of why or where. I've lost my sense of continuously grey time lost under a halo of pink sunset behind clouds watching planes land between raindrops on the windshield at the local airport sitting in a raincovered car on a hill under the southern runway approach. Your sense of place rushes to leave, to walk away on stalk legs filled with lichen and strewn with redbud leaves in full glory. You hold quietly with what was lost, or never was yours to lose. Stretching and compressing those spaces between where fingers touch, where tiniest hairs on the backs of your hand stand on end with electricity and regret. Moving strangely.

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2 Comments:

Blogger Jim Murdoch said...

Nice, evocative piece. Not sure I have anything profound to say about it other than I read it over three times and just enjoyed the sounds of the words.

10:49 PM  
Blogger Art Durkee said...

Thanks, Jim. Appreciated.

9:29 PM  

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