| | | Time by Chris Martin
All that happens happens
in the hollow
mouth
open mid-vow
knowing
only song will do
what an empty cave needs
done, drone
that seeds to fill
one space and then that
space's space, what
are we made
of if
not chants.
Sun slumping up
the stucco, cat chewing
her tail clean, nimbi
darkening the fallen
leaves leatherlike, I make
voice, voice, voice, voices
like a fist
on thinking's door
a fistula
wrapping abstraction
and binding it to what, morning
sickness, the lathed light
now flying through branches
made sinister
by season, a crook
in the amygdala's grey
ministry and all
I see is a circling murder
above the antenna
that replaced the weathervane.
All I see is one
millionth
percent of the earth
at once. Chance.
I give you the fingers
of my hand
like I was giving you broken
beige rulers.
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| Copyright © 2013 by Chris Martin. Used with permission of the author. |
About This Poem "In the midst of reading Philip Whalen's great selected Decompressions, I came across this line: 'Everything between time.' Ever since I've been obsessively writing poems all called TIME. This particular TIME partakes in one of my other obsessions, the life of the late hominid, which goes hairily on within us."
--Chris Martin
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Poem-A-Day was launched in 2006 and features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive. |
| Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org. |
| | | |  Chris Martin is the author of two books of poetry, Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press, 2011) and American Music (Copper Canyon Press, 2007). He lives in Iowa City. |
| Related Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay by Walt Whitman by Alice Notley |
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