Poem : “Interval”
*
Interval between one and another second
Small, heavy-swung space
Heavy pendulum, an eye’s weight at the base
Tight-twisted flags of string to pull it
It moves across a hundred ever-dividing
Ever-halving steps, each a frame and a process
*
Intervalia as Zeno saw it
Every thing must reach half way to its final point before the final point itself
An infinite series of intervals
Is therefore required
A breach of natural law to do anything or go anywhere
*
Any movement, every single slow ticking swing
Every deft spill and lift of the pendulum’s twine and bearing
Defies sacred law
Intervals contain within them each rule governing in precision the whole of motion and stillness
And so we can only look at each as its own system
Giving life its capturable, huntable value
*
One piece of accomplished universal incident after another
Dividing and halving
To smaller and smaller gains
Get C.’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
*
Every observable law, every huntable scrit of knowledge,
Amounts to the image wheel that we insist on perceiving as a forward persistent procession
Of sequence, consequence, and from the intervals between these
Sense of intention, ownership of the same
Memories that extend ever forward
As the Andean Aymara rightly say
And a future always behind and unknown
As the same rightly describe
*
And we, that most preoccupied animal, occupying mountain, field, steppe and city
Congregants here and disloyal wanderers there
Called up from stillness with a single word
Once — An interval in which all time was, in an instant, unfurled, created, weighed, measured, and portioned out, and
Made right, the moment that it diverted, and called back to self the very
Second that it swayed, a pendulum in the endless wind-lashed dark,
Striking out in pride
Struck down to fragment and interval
To the groan and traipse of a
Frame-stuttered
Endlessly small and unprofitable
Image
*
Much Desired
Much Forgotten
