Time Flies,21: 59 Poem by STANLEY PACION

Darling, Tempus fugit, right?
That's how the Latin goes.
Virgil, wasn't it?
But who cares anyways,
I must say, hey Virgil, this is stupid stuff,
Because for me at home alone
The clock has stopped.

Then, when I take another glance,
I realize from the timepiece's face
That I had been mistaken, my impression wrong.
The clock's hands have apparently moved.

Yet far from time fleeting,
The hours drag, even the second hand -
Its motion becomes imperceptibly slow,
When you are gone and
Day and night must be faced alone.

And you write to me and say that before long
You will return home. You declare that
Less than three weeks remain,
Soon, you add, your absence today turns to memory,

And confidently profess, "time really does fly! "

But for me, no matter how you try to comfort,
Your words are empty; they do nothing to hasten the hours!
When I hear the clock, note the spaces
Between its regular tick-to-tock, those intervals,
They appear as if they were eternity, and your absence
- Your face no longer upon your pillow,
Your body missing from your side of the bed -
You, you seem now to have been gone forever.


2.

I know. I know. You suppose that I exaggerate!
Still I am not acclimated to them,
These phenomena of your leaving,
Your terrible disappearances for the sake of business,
These separations, how may I ever become used to them!

You were reared different from me.

When you were still a girl,
Your father was a frequent traveler;
From childhood on you grew accustomed
To experience longing, and you learned to practice
A ruse which had told your inner self that
He will be home before you know it.

I can hear you and your mother rehearsing the phrase,
When dad was gone and you two sat at home alone,
"Oh the days go by so fast! "

The electronic image of time before me
(to the bottom-right on the computer screen)
Its numbers read 21: 59.

It sits. It waits.
Woman! Can't you see what you have done to me?
What it means to be without you?
Now before me looms the terror,
The nightmare forecast, have you heard
What new science tells us
About the desolation to which all things row?


3.

The universe endlessly expanding,
With its boundary beacons actually accelerating,
Points of light at outermost fabric of space/time,
Increasing speed, faster and faster, and distancing apart,
Separately hastening from one star-light point to another,
All of them at once unimaginably gaining velocity
Now farther and farther, becoming
Less and less visible one to the other,
Each spot, with its incredible luminosity,
All the great-big burns of atomic power
Endlessly hurling at quicking pace, hurrying and hurrying,
Ever picking up speed at the edge of empty space,
Scurrying to extend, stretching the cosmos,
Until ultimately everything that exists anywhere
Has no one object in sight of any other.

Might I ever hope to expect the bright of your eyes
To bridge the black night,
Where time slips into nothingness,
And the law of gravity no longer applies,
Every principle of attraction confounded.

Me having seen your face in every flower,
That once at summer's dusk we still felt warmth,
And at dawn when we awoke we felt it again.
My longing here, my each and every thought of you
Mean nothing when all spheres turn to final ice,
And all hope of perennial bloom becomes forlorn,

There is no sunshine when you're gone.

Time at a halt, no more even the instant, and in the abyss
No star glimmers, no light shines out of the darkness,

I wish you were in my arms tonight.

The elctronic numbers on my computer clock read 21: 59.