Time Passages

For Alan Holley & for Jodie Williams& for my children 

Had we but world enough and time”
—Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress

Once, a while before
                              time began to count,
I stood on shore with a girl and saw a petrel
Fly its colours—tropic green, volcanic


Grey—above the azure
                                     of a bay.
We’re long done, she and I, but still
I stand, glad in the sun, married to the moment


We shared with a bird
                            while earth spun and spooled
Its breezes, unspooled reprises of every day
Yet sung. Time does not pass in the country of


The mind; the heart
                            is not a race time runs,
For time is tidal there. But in the flesh—
Where one turn’s all we seem to get—time wins.


What if we live
                         two lives at once: one like
An ocean; the other, a shore? What if who
We are did not begin with us—each fish,


A river; each bird, a sky?
                                     The petrel lives
A circuit, neither here nor there: her home
A way she fares, a round she wings. Once,

Coming counter-
                            clockwise, like the bird,
Time landed in the bay and stayed. Time found
A world, which, until then, contained, like each


Of us, the world enough;
                                     which spoke five hundred
Tongues—keeping, each, the kind of time
That rivers keep. And seeds. For, once, this was


A world that had no time
                                     for time, no space
For haste. What counted here were mind and matter—
Places and their lyrics, caught and released,


Sown and reaped,
                            kept wild in mouths and ways,
The nomadic canticle days, of people who told
Their names in care for kin and made their homes


In circles. And then
                            there came this second-hand realm
Whose hours never ebbed—the world that beached
That day and wound its clocks and laid a maths


Of months and minutes
                                      down across the dreaming
Land. But the dreaming wasn’t once. It couldn’t
Stop. It never wasn’t; it always is.


Truth is, since then,
                            the world’s a two-track mind:
Time runs sly beside the dry-creek beds,
While down the rivers, days migrate like eels


And spawn and die
                            at sea, and later like children
Return; the days migrate like plovers north,
and in their season, like oceans, reprise the shore.


There was a world,
                            and still there is, that sings
The seasons low in circling breath and phrases
The days in currents and rains and birds that make


All moments over
                            into country. The dreaming
Days don’t pass; they mean. Forever’s going
Nowhere fast; being refuses measure.


But even when this world
                                     was all the time
There was, whales and curlews and snipes shipped other
Tempi here—the Silk Road, the Arctic, Japan—


And timeless weathers
                                     back the way that time
Had swum: the Leewards, Tahiti, the Deeps. The dreaming  
Drifts. The shorebirds make its pieces fast.


No island is
                    an island in a world
That won’t lie still. Eternity notwithstanding,
Time’s been running headlong from the start.


And so it’s noon
                            and then it’s night and then
It’s dawn again. The world grows long and years
Grow short. Even in the dreaming, deadlines

                           
Fall. Come, teach me the trick
                                      of keeping one’s feet
On ageless ground, my love, while leading one’s days
In time. Sing me a piece of the river’s mind.


The places seem
                            to know the score the shore
Shares with the sea. And down below the trees,
The George’s River spreads its canopy
                           

Of fallen light.
                   And this, you say, is where
You once were young. What happened to you back then
Is where we stand today. Beside us on sandstone


The fig and
                    the apple have interlaced their limbs.
The smoke of fires rises where it always
Rose; currawongs play for time with song;


And long-finned eels
                             swim coral seas upstream.
Let earth rehearse in us slow words for love
Let love rehearse in earth slow words for time.

Notes.

1. Petrel—the Tahiti petrel and one or two others travel more or less the same route (not including New Zealand) James Cook travelled from the North Pacific to the east coast of Australia.

2. Time does not pass in the country/ of the mind—I have in mind the chapter “The Country of the Mind” in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams

3. Neither here nor there—Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”

4.  A way she fares—I have in mind ideas about home as migration, a way fared, once or perpetually, as if the way were the home, explored by Wade Davis in The Wayfarers.

5. Time landed in the bay and stopped—The landing of Captain James Cook in Botany Bay, 1770.

6. But when this world was all the time there was... the shorebirds make its pieces fast: I have in mind the way this “timeless land” was, all the while, joined to the rest of the world by the migratory birds.

7. No island ins an island: references John Donne’s “No man is an island”: “No man is an island entire of itself;/ every man is a piece of the continent,/ a part of the main…”

8. The fig and the apple—the Port Jackson Fig and the Angophora, or Rough-barked Apple.

9. Long-finned eels—I’ve described here what is understood to be the life-cycle of the long-finned (and the short-finned) eel, which spawns in the Coral Sea and dies, and its young swim on the East Australia Current to river mouths on the east coast of Australia, and the maturing eels find their way up rivers—it is thought, in each case the same river their parent inhabited—to live in fresh water for up to sixty years…