Day and Night Birthed All Our Hours

Our fields, our ghosts, our war zones,
Our clocks and gods, the drawn-out

Dreams that we could learn to count,
Yang and Yin, the one from none—

All start from that pulse, that spin.
Day. Night. Day. And then. And then.

The whole of life blinks in them,
What grows, wastes, wanes, and is gone.

But what’s this tip of a vine,
This weed that pokes at the night,

That glows in the dark, that flies
Through the gates of dusk and dawn

Then sails on? There were two states
To the whole, the one and none,

But one with none is not one,
Nor two, nor three, nor yet none.

I lie on my back in the grass
When night drops day’s first pale hints,

And the lights that wheel and rush
To get to the end of this

Touch the far foam of their waves
To the shores of my small mind.

There are no hours. What we count
Won’t come back to us. Not once.

Or We Could Kill Some Time

Stone from the guts of a god,
Stone swapped for a child, that one—

What could it mean we ask it,
Of all things, what will be next?

It fell to earth in one piece
And is a lump on a stand,

In a box, in a green grove,
In a tent on the bare sands,

And we beg for it to speak,
While the god who should have died

But was swapped out for a stone
And saved, Zeus grew up to fetch

The stone from the wrong god’s guts,
From the god who was not time,

Who did his best to stop time
And to stave off all these tales,

These tales we can’t seem to stop,
More deaths, meals, gods, tricks, groves, rocks.