In Search of Found Time
The Michelin star collapsed
on itself, creating a supernova
right in the heart of Lyon.
Then the world spun
only without baguettes, a
restaurant guide or ingénues.
In its wake, patience
earned a new name,
it’s called gray.
All the while, ingenious Silicon
Valley calculate the time it takes to
get from here to Montezuma for
Tripadvisor’s indigenous heritage month.
Tourists toggle swiftly
from walk
to bus to
time machine.
The bardo bumps up against
the names we’ve made for it.
Sediment layers take the place of words.
Ancestors, on the off chance
you’re listening: igneous.
Ok, so I’m a bit obsessed with time lately. Mostly traces of time and liminal spaces. I recently finished reading the brilliant Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, The Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K Le Guin, watched Solaris and finished watching Archive 81 on Netflix… heavy stuff, back-to-back-to-back. Also booking train tickets to Machu Picchu really piles on to the whole time travel thread.
Anyway, I’m starting to think differently about the thin veils that separate ‘worlds’. These seem to be less of a “step back in time”, and more of a “time steps into you”. It’s almost as if time is truly stored in things, like an ice cap, a recipe book or a tree ring — not merely detailed there.
At risk of writing too many rambling thoughts on the subject, I’ve consolidated the ramblings into a scattered poem. I tell myself it’s to represent the helix of time... pfft. Really I just wanted to play with words that are similar to ingenious.
Title is a reference to Proust.