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Time-Slice in MillisecondsTime-slice in milliseconds, I don't know whose phrase it is, Roger Penrose, or one of those chaos and computer books, or, no, it comes up on the screen of the AS400 when you push a wrong button.Time-slice in milliseconds, everywhere in town today there are trees bright yellow, or maybe going copper, surrounded by green, surrounded by blah, among brown walls, spots of bright yellow. Time-slice in milliseconds, the dry square ditch of the Santa Fe River after a storm, brimful of muddy water brown and thick as chocolate. Time-slice in milliseconds: "Ask yourself, where are my feet?" said Lew Richmond one lecture at Tassajara after he fell under the sway of Thich Nhat Hanh. Where are my feet, I thought dutifully the next day; I was up the creek in the meadow just below the seventh crossing, I had just ducked under a fallen tree and time-slice in milliseconds I will be there forever, feet on the ground. "I used to be shiny," said the car. For two days on the road every time a (really) new car slid into our field of vision on either side, my car Midnight sniveled. "I was new once, I used to be shiny" time-slice in milliseconds, don't stop, verweile doch. Nothing ever stops changing is what Buddism teaches. The books about the rocks up in the Belt formations of Montana all emphasize how the sediments were laid down before there were burrowing animals to disturb them and never since metamorphosed. It's a billion years later and you can see ripple marks, mud cracks on the bedding planes, RAINDROPS. It worried me for days, how nothing changed for a billion years--rather like me--a complete violation of anicca, a time-slice in a thousand million years, a rain drop splash. You have to take the experts' word for things. Stand here and marvel, the sign tells you at Moraine Lake; these are Cambrian rocks, trilobites lived here, see on the bedding plane these scratch marks made by trilobites walking by... time-slice I took my mom up the Pecos River a couple of falls ago. She remembers walking in the trees along the Rio Mora, I remember a stand of aspens at Jacks Creek glittering yellow, color uniform as a crayola; a breeze, the air full of bright clear yellow coins. Time-slice in milliseconds, birds wheeling in sunset air below my hiding spot on the ridge in Oregon where the commune tried to live time-slice the meeting was going on for days and days, now and again someone would leave our lives forever. We met and met and met; this one had gone on for hours, I fell asleep in the armchair, "...and so I have to leave" said Art time-slice in milliseconds my heart has turned over and I'm upstairs in the dark saying, "I was asleep maybe this is a dream tell me it's a dream." A script from a soap opera, someone bolts from a room as if noone else existed and runs and clings to her former lover, say you aren't leaving time-slice in milliseconds sunlight shafts on glaciers under grey shifting clouds time-slice. I'm lying on a bed in a motel in Twin Bridges, Montana, trying to distract myself from irritation because I had never thought to spit in the Columbia River, or the Kootenay or the Bitterroot, sent no molecules to Portland as I had sent them this week to the Arctic, to Hudson's Bay, to New Orleans, and day after tomorrow would send to the Gulf of California and to the mouth of the Rio Grande at Brownsville. Portland, I was thinking, half asleep. Portland and Baja and no way out in between and time-slice in milliseconds suddenly wide awake I'll-be-damned, that's what Great Basin means. On the toe of the Athabasca Glacier I touch my finger to the thin coat of meltwater. A few mud grains come loose, trickle away. Entranced I stir the dirt here and there. Look, there it goes, on its way to the Arctic Ocean; ok, I've done my bit for process, helped the ice in its work. The tiny brown clouds run away in a tiny rivulet. "Almost home," says Wayne. But it has so far to go to get to the Arctic, I say, seeing the mud grains settle settle in the dark on cold abyssal plains so far from here. He said, "Think how long it has already spent being rock, billions of years. What's left to do is hardly anything." Yes. Time-slice in milliseconds. October, 1990 |
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Issue #8, April, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.