The Tune of a Lifetime

The House of Time

*

 

Stephen Edgar

And fleetingly it seemed to him

That in between one eye blink and the next

Time paused, allowing time to be installed

Within that countless interim,

Coiled up, on hold,

A memory predicted and recalled.

Now, that weak muscle flexed,

All that contained him started to unfold

In front of him, a moving book

In three dimensions he could wander through,

At will, at any point, now, since, before,

To feel, to listen and to look—

A house, or suite

Of rooms around a circling corridor,

And waiting there, he knew,

Were all the peopled days he’d not repeat.

Slowly he stretched his hand to open

The first door on his right. Why, this was easy:

Christmas when he was seven, and his aunt

Playing a polonaise by Chopin,

Badly. “Lenore,

We know you think you can, dear, but you can’t.”

And he was resting, queasy

From too much pudding. Now, another door:

So far, so faint, not yet an I,

A pulse of sense, he hung upon a web

Of knitted blood. Above, the muffled heart

Performed its mindless lullaby

And in the womb

He slept on half awake. That was his part

Elsewhere, too, at the ebb

Of his last consciousness. Another room:

He recognized at once the face

Of one who five years hence he would have bound

As closely to him as a Siamese twin.

How recklessly he would replace

That loving care.

Absorbed, now, in the dream of skin on skin,

He whispered the profound

And destined promises she’d never share.

He shuddered, shut it, and proceeded.

So room on room, all of his scenes, arranged

In simultaneous succession, played

Before him, unignored, unheeded,

Each a tableau

Vivant and drama, driven and yet stayed,

Developing, unchanged.

At last the time that paused for time to flow

He saw was coming to an end.

He saw himself before himself, distinct

As when—a life ago—it came to him

A single blink could comprehend,

And then unfold,

All time within that countless interim.

He blinked. And then he blinked.

And time continued as it coiled, on hold.

 

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