Do you need time?
I suppose I do. Without it, instead of life being one thing after the other, it would be everything all at once. The latter seems chaotic. But maybe one could get used to being timeless. I have no basis for comparison. I’ve always been just in time. Come to think of it, it would be nice not to have to conjugate verbs.
What are you doing this evening?
Who can know such things? I’m not a fortuneteller. But as I just came off a travel cycle, a betting person would put his money on something sleep related.
My ideal week would consist of seven days, each day of about twenty-four hours. You could fit four of them in a month with room to spare.
When all is quiet and harmonious, and one anticipates good things are to come.
summer day from shade:
time attunes to floating
clouds and ducks.
once a mountain,
now just boulders; someday
not a hill will remain.
Sparrows cast on my desk their shadows in pair,
And willow down falls in my inkstone here and there.
Sitting by the window, I read the Book of Change,
Not knowing when has Spring gone, I only feel strange.
Note: This is the joint translation of Xu Yuanchong and Xu Ming found in the Golden Treasury of Quatrains and Octaves (a Bilingual edition of 千家诗 “Thousands of Poems”) on which they collaborated (i.e. China Publishing Group: Beijing (2008) p. 40)
I plan to travel to the future one minute at a time.
At least until they invent a time machine that can transport something bigger than a subatomic particle, and only milliseconds into the future at that.
I read the space
Around the poem.
It has no meaning,
But says so much.
It betrays a little secret
That no reader ever learned
Who was too concerned
With what was written,
While wholly inattentive
To
What
Was
Not.
Everything but waiting the five minutes to press the plunger on the French press. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
Tiger Riding for Beginners 