The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now

"Time is what clocks measure." ~ A. Einstein

"Time...is what keeps everything from happening at once." ~ Ray Cummings


but there are those who'd have you believe
everything does happen at once,
that time is incarnate and of one substance, Divine Trinity,
Past, Present, and Future, Maker
of all things visible and invisible.
The world grows old by a series of geologic
accretion of facts. Time is a cyclical event
powered by gravity.

The scripture of numbers is large,
the seconds and minutes adding up to years,
to thousands of years, ticking away like
frames in a film strip, and what you must remember
always, is what you have left behind.

What you learn is holy. It is bread and sleep. It will rise like dough
to wonder, as if its words were stored
like names in a mountain vault, kept dry, accessible
for ten thousand years, waiting to be called forth
like Lazarus, each by his own ineffable tag.

And that thing you must remember from dreams
each millenium when the cuckoo (the last great voice)
calls, is this: the little boat you came in on;
the river becoming a sea; the undertow; the taste
of salt on your tongue; the sweet ache
of that apple, the soft fruit that fell
into your still-young throat as knowledge,

it's seeds and skins (what you must leave behind)
discarded with your uninhabited and mostly irreducible
mortal bones. Remember:

Lazarus.

.JED 3-9-12