Shouting TIME

So may I someday, sitting at play in my little unknown courtyard.

-A line from the poem “The Last Romantic” by John Ashbery.

May I, I pray,

someday, say TIME.

My mouth open, but breath stopped.

No air twisted by my language.

Not the word, but the event. TIME.

Its meaning will be conveyed by rote memory

directly into the minds of the people. TIME.

My name will be undead.

From then on, my name will be foreknown

by every baby born, by every deathbed rosary grip,

as the philosopher who knew how to tongue the name of Saturn

that no mortal had ever pronounced before. TIME.

The soundless rote memory of each molecule

and flexed in crystalline chirality. The turn of a closing sarcophagus jar,

screwed into the body of a helical protein. TIME.

The cousin of those twins, Heat and Pressure,

who would hear my call, and would answer,

by vibrating the hollow bones of birds, BIRDSONG TRIUMPHANT,

in simultaneous exultation.

Their talons on the ledges of the rows of ossuaries

that line the psychic riverbanks of the city.

Saturn returns a kiss. Lovingly.

Placing his expressionless lips on the forehead of my skull.

Willard van Dyke, Funnels, 1932

• Photo in Phaidon, The Photo Book, p. 127.

If one is intake and the other is output,

they circulate ironies.

On the right, boater hat straight to the sky,

one attentively waits on an arrival.

On the left, face bending the first,

a gossip attends only to its companion.

Sky setting for HVAC,

Denver periscope and snorkel extended in ether,

either one pipe-fitted to purpose,

differently, anatomically differentiated,

completely interchangeable.

Below the photographer’s frame

there has to be a maze, anatomically has to be,

in architecture, on a rooftop, a circulatory system

and unseen rhythms of building inspectors,

repairers, roofers, breathers, odors,

all breathing in timetables, calendars, municipal bylaws,

chartable but not really charted except by Willard van Dye

who looked up to a sunless cloudless unbirdened sky

without the draw of church steeple or billboard or neon light

and the shadow of the pie-plate topper on the straight one

indicates the Sun it shining in its face and on van Dyke’s back

and from this angle he must be lying down on the roof,

Willard’s camera as far away from the base of the Funnels

as inches are between the soles of his feet and his eyes

the hypotenuse thereof ridden by the focus of his lens –

the only straight line of the entire picture

that is not hooked by a corner and recycled forever in circles.

Canadian farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in CV2, The New Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Nashwaak Review, The Great Lakes Review, Pamenar Press, The Ex-Puritan, Studies in Social Justice, and ~200 more places. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for funding during the polycrisis.