What Kind Of Thing Is Time

What kind of thing is time — an attic, a barracks, a jail,

a borderline, a dirty trick, an evil, a newspaper, a sovereign?...

For him who has shoveled out the burning coals of life,

Time is a boot, a dime.

But the wing of a butterfly is like the hand of a child.

And the turtledove is as cool as a wave.

And fire repeats the stars on earth.

And we can see the ladder from Jacob's dream.

How frightening is time: it pushes the Light away.

How it insists on playing and is tangled up in play.

It has no secrets — that is the only secret

of any span of time, digging a tunnel like a mole.

It is so alien to me, so far from having any use,

that I must climb out of here not backward

and not forward, but upward. Upward, on lines of verse.

On a letter tossed up into the blue, tossed up into the City.