Erin Blevins

The Waste Sad Time
thoughts after T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”

I
silence, and, in the beginning,
dark. dark journeys, drifting through
exquisite passageways, down tunnels lined
with portraits of our mothers, tunnels curved
like seaweed, delicate as fronds.
we are nothing yet, a chance
subsumed in red, visceral dark.
waiting.

II
the sperm and the egg
make the cell and the cells make
the mind and the mind makes the man and the man
makes poetry?
and the man
makes war?
an unending line of creation ever descending,
ever tending down.
sometimes we leave reflections in the still pools
but we go past too quickly to see them.
the actin flash propels us from the first
and drives us on.

III
we cannot cling to it, our hollow-cored hope
for the past. always moving forward we cannot pause
to upraise the temples, we cannot stop to put the features
back on stone, or on the faces of the dead.
they ebb, erode and disappear.
we exist only horizontally in time, spread thin
over the planet, spreading beyond
into the dark. we stretch so far; we dare
to stretch so far, but the journey from wingtip to wingtip is more
than a lifetime long, so if we separate
we shall not meet again.

IV
the vicious children writhe inside our loins
wanting their time,
demanding time, but the gift of birth is only
the gift of impatience, the only birthright we possess
a blinding light.

V
After the moment, after the waiting in the dark,
after the flash and silent months of growth
we think we are ready, bear down, push ourselves out and forwards;
ignorant children cannot wait for time.
Born screaming and heedless of echoes we hurl ourselves
into the emptiness,
trying to cross the void into the past,
into the future, throwing rocks
into the still pools,
building and burning temples,
anything
to preserve our time,
anything.

VI
We have made monuments
for the dead and the living,
monuments for love and grief,
remembrances of the roads we took.
We shall not meet again and know each other.
We do not know the children in the photographs,
swept into the void as we moved on into ourselves
with no space to mourn. We do not know these children,
running through the still pools and the grasses of the fields,
making a ruckus of time.
We think they possessed eternity,
but did not know its name.

VII
This is our only moment;
the water in the pool runs by too quickly to reflect,
or the light does, spanning galaxies,
carrying no mark of its beginning.
We fall through days and incarnations of ourselves,
frantic for permanence,
constructing a past from bits of paper and potsherds,
pretending we will endure, pretending
we will be remembered afterwards.
Time is only, time is always now. Our life is in the dwindling
of destination to location,
where we go to where we are, and what we were
to what we have become,
the past slipping through our hands as memory,
the future an excuse to postpone this,
our only time.

VIII
Life is in the dwindling, the descent from dark
to dark through winding passageways.
Echoes return, preserve the way our voices sounded,
once, but go unrecognized;
the children in the photographs are strange.
If we separate we will not meet again,
we will forget, will stumble on
into a future that perpetually recedes, waiting
for our time.
This is our time, these unredeemable
dark moments of descent, between our beginning
and our end.
There is no hereafter.
Life is only,
life is always now, and if we separate
we shall not meet again.

Dreams

She left the week’s first dream laid out plain in her journal. We could tell she’d had one from the way she sat at the breakfast table, pulling the inside from her bagel and leaving the round shell. She was hardly out the door before Mother was in her room, flipping through the pages. We shivered at the dream, at her bare feet walking through snow in an orchard. The impossible red of the apples made us laugh.

We devour her dreams. They come too fast, too strong for her, so we gnaw holes in the thick cloud of them-so she can breathe. The red apples and white snow sustained us for a while, but after three days and no dreams we felt two-dimensional, slid around the corners of the house like shadows on the walls. At dinnertime she’d tell us about her day at school, but it was not the same.

Father found the dream of the golden man, set between the books on her shelf as if we couldn’t see the difference. It shone, and we breathed deeply of the way he tossed his hair back, of the light that brushed his skin. She sat behind a camera lens, and we heard the shutter click. We shivered again. The golden man cupped her hands like doves and at dinner that night she lay them on the table softly, like wings or feathers come to rest. She had circles under her eyes. “I can’t remember my dreams,” she said. “I remember them when I wake up, but in an hour or a day they’re gone.” Father gave a curious laugh and Mother told her gently that it happened to everyone sometimes, and would stop soon. She nodded, but that night she slept with the door of her room closed.

We knew she was having dreams-we could tell, from the way she sat at the breakfast table. We knew she was hiding them; her eyes grew dark and after dinner each night she’d go to her room and shut the door. We’d sit outside it, staring, breathing quietly, until one night we heard the snick of the lock and we knew that she knew. Father was angry, but Mother made him remember the taste of her dreams, how much we needed them. The three of us sat and stared at the white, wood-panel door. Around us the house turned grey and filled with dust.

She hid her dreams like Easter eggs, some nestled in trees, some buried, some in high cupboards in the kitchen. We found them all eventually, but only after they’d gone stale and the color had dried out of them. Starving, sometimes we’d eat them anyway, the corners sticking in our mouths.

We found the last dream wrapped with cotton and still fresh. She’d hidden it inside her pillow. We clustered around the bed and unwound each layer, clumsy with excitement. Suddenly the last piece pulled free and there she was, walking through a field of imperfect grass. A white rock sparkled in the light and caught her eye-she stopped, bent over to pull it from the ground. Long fingers worked it free, leaving a small hole in the dirt where it lay. She held it in her palm; it was small, cold. Suddenly, ten thousand ants swarmed from the hole in the ground. They were tiny and red-brown, and crawled everywhere. She was consumed. The ants ran over the white rock lying on the ground.

We liked this dream. Its juice was sweet and made us lick our fingers.