Carol Frith – Ⅳ

t=0 

 

   after Bill Bryson

 

 

 

 

Time will have to equal zero – young

as cipher. Younger. Nothing stays here. You

and I are passage, and the sky’s a lung

above us, breathing music, one or two

performances a day, symphonies

of rain and bell-sounds moving upward like

a flock of gulls. No, I’m wrong. Not these –

not ragtag gulls, who like to scream and strike

a posture. They won’t do. A breathless song,

perhaps, round notes against the glass of sky,

a song that blossoms when it’s held too long,

the zeros in its register too high.

A pitch that equals passage equals time—

divided by the zeros in its rhyme.