Daylight Savings Time Blues

I stared through the window as the sun fell
and only read my magazine sporadically.
How much time I had to contemplate the view.
There wasn’t much of one, but it wasn’t raining.
And there was lots of time and little water.
From rehab a man stumbled to cross the path
of a black dog being led on a long leash,
while the sun was dropping: daylight savings time
had just begun the other week: the bounty
was time concentered in my blue fists by ocean.

Time slipped through the furrows of my palms
as money or water. If money, it had passed
or was about to come. If water, it was under me.
Puddles were frozen mirrors dusted with gravel,
the sight of which Narcissus would have spurned.
What is the dirty aspect wedded to the ground?
He left the rehab center in tatters: the future
was clear, it could be moved like mounds of dirt.

My stare rose through a picture window to the sky
to fall onto an old address, the end of the street
where my neighbor talked despairingly of economics
to the passing cars on the new arterial.
The ferry station’s glitter hadn’t happened yet.
The porch sagged as it oversaw the tankers.
A drive-in bank took the place of a tavern
(Rex and His Fingers Three played weekly).

And above the piers rose the oil-derricks,
detail busy as overturned horseshoe crabs,
their ancient fretwork looking terribly new,
their heliarc lights dusting what they touched –
broken keels, brass chronometers
leaning into gravel-pits. You’d think in the mist
the lamps would make spontaneous gas
and spark another dawn among the dew
that clings to I-beams and to blue tarpaulins
where spider-webs suspend among their eyelets.


Nov. 3 2002--Feb 04 rev’d