1
Oh, the jewel in the lotus, ahhhh.
Right now.
Joy in the heart of the moment.
Right now.
The heat of the moment.
This instant.
Blossom of the moment.
Time is a sphere
and the moment right now
the still center
through which everything flows,
a raft meandering with the river,
an easy ride for angels of the Tao.
Always now.
Before you were born,
after you die:
now.
2
Time runs through angels
like rivers through canyons.
Of course, angels may only be
the space between the river
and the canyon rim,
the emptiness left
after water erodes
what was there
away.
3
My brother Bob
was no angel.
Bob’s dead now
but I remember him
like a river in a canyon,
and probably because of the constant pain
he lived with from a ruined leg,
he took refuge when he could
in the blossom of the moment.
I remember one night,
having finished
his seventh spliff of killer,
he nodded and announced,
“Screw the past.
It already happened.”
Rivers don’t run backward.
You remember the river maybe
where you crossed it,
or where you stopped for lunch
at the falls in late spring,
but you remember it now,
the blossom of the moment,
and if I have tears on my cheeks
because Bob isn’t here
to remember it with me–
the flash of the kingfisher,
the banded cream and ash
of alders shivering in the downstream breeze–
time doesn’t stop–
the river slides through the canyon, pools, falls;
and Bob was right
the past is over,
done, gone,
but I’m not sure,
a sob caught in my throat,
whether I’m the one
waving good-bye
from the bank
or the boat.
4
There’s a story,
probably apocryphal,
that when the Taoist master Lao-tzu
was passing into the wilderness
one of the guards at the frontier
recognized him and pleaded,
“Oh Master, leave us your wisdom
on the mystery of time,”
to which Lao-tzu, riding his donkey,
turned and laughed over his shoulder,
“Too late to stop now.”
4A
In another version of the story
Lao-tzu turns his donkey around
and rides back to the guard,
reaches down and touches his shoulder,
looks into his eyes, and says,
“I can tell you this for sure:
The future is always on time
and your ass better be there.”
5
The duration of a moment
is best measured
as the length and depth of time
required to say:
“Meet me in the French Quarter at midnight.”
(Though I personally favor
“You must go now.”)
6
It may be that not all nows
are of equal duration
(the hydraulic position)
or that they are
(the mechanistic view)
or that they are
experienced differently
by different people
(the experiential notion).
A huge argument about this,
the nature of time, rages,
and some of the boys have begun
calling each other dreadful names
like “dithering shithead,” “moron,” and “angel.”
Now, now.
7
“Time,”
Rexroth wrote,
“is the mercy of eternity.”
Which doesn’t mean for a minute
that you can expect
mercy from time.
Gregory Peck
shot in the back.
The patchy cream and ash
of alder bark.
Your hand in mine,
both of us looking
up at the big screen
and crying,
O nameless sorrow,
and a meanness
in the world–
sometimes
just too damn much.
The stranger in the same aisle,
who arrived in the purple
’56 Ford,
calls over, “Don’t feel bad.
You know, the great thing about life
is you get till you die
to decide if it’s worth it.
That’s plenty of time.”
The man sitting behind us
says under his breath,
“Shit,
they shot
Gregory Peck
in the back.
What’s that
all about?”
And on-screen
the bandito who shot him
kicks Gregory Peck in the ribs,
hard,
to make sure
he’s dead,
then pushes back his sombrero
and eases the hammer down on his stolen Colt.
He says to Gregory Peck’s body
lying in the blood-soaked dust,
“It’s about time,
amigo.”
Moments ago now.
And just then,
that long, slow,
forlorn cry.
And when we finished weeping
we walked out of the movie about time,
still holding hands,
into the late winter afternoon
under a low, scuffed-nickel sky.