Making Time

I have been trying to make time

for years

The recipe never comes out

But the years go by

Slow burn, oven at 450* and

The earth is getting hotter

Where does the time go?

Is it a soup, carefully portioned

into freezer bags for winter months

Or a big ol brownie in a pan,

Time as an omelet, maybe? 

Farm-fresh eggs and cheesy goodness

Maybe I'm making time all wrong,

thinking it's something to eat --

To make time, I could try dipping

white cloth into the many colors of the months

Time-died and loose

Weave strips of it into blankets and

bandanas, something useful

And adorning

Am I even getting to the point of time?

Trying to make something out of nothing

It's like asking a genie for more wishes

Is time like art? Once it's released

Once it's been revealed, it has no owner

Time is its interpretation, Time

To exist in the eye of the beholder

Belief making it true, Time

Continuing on in memory

Observation, and

Expectation

This is how my mother made time:

She poured flour onto the marble cutting board

Set the dough and left it to rise

We went outside and counted dandelions,

named the rocks in the front yard

And came inside to punch the dough down

By nighttime the white flecks and yeast

and dimples of tiny fists had become something warm

to be shared, to stuff into mouths

laughing and watching The Lion King 

on a living room rug

Other times, time was made in the transit

Watching the moon rise through the car window

The first words you shared as the radio buzzed on 

marked the end of a day, beginning of rest

The space between became

The space shared between people,

a sacred ritual, a confession booth

My father made time in tricks and tests,

He asked me, 

How do you think I saw the sun set twice today? 

The answer was something for me to come to 

on my own, time was made

into a riddle, and an answer, and it was mine

if I could solve it:

How fast can you run up seven flights

to see the same orange face of day 

disappear again

over a further horizon?

There was a hope in the idea, that moving forward,

further up and further in,

meant time was forming beneath me 

and all around me,

never out of my grasp

If I could keep up

Or find the right container

I learned to unmake time too, to morph it, to

disappear it

If time exists in observation, we must exist outside of it

Or else with its loss we disappear  too

Sometimes 

Time is made in sounds

Deep breaths in, short gasps,

the sound of an entire pond of frogs silencing

as you step from rock to rock

Can a minute fit in your lungs? Can ten?

Can the pain of an entire year fit into the padding thop 

of bare feet to the sink, creaking faucet, the slowing metal drip 

as the water stops,

The space of the entire world inside your bathtub,

pressing in on your ears with a softened rumble

Let out in

An outlet

The time we were together, lived through 

again and again in the sounds of a song, 

All of it fit into three minutes of clumsy guitar  

Time is made in circles, bottom heavy to summer

arching up to the top of the year as the wheel turns 

Turns pulling the roots as we sow the next season

Sun salutations into autumn and the days grow 

Shorter, folded into red and orange, the sun becoming 

a part of each tree it touches and the leaves

Fall, a sacrifice to the earth as it turns,

The sun playing peekaboo-- there it is, coming up again--

snuck up behind me as I ran up those stairs: 

The sun set twice for me

As the seasons roll up to the top of the circle again 

And the trees are bare

The stark silhouettes are the hands of a clock,

Each pointing to a neverending sky

It opens 

Again and again and again