There is still time
beside those other dimensions—
and that is why we rhyme.
Imagists talk long and tall, poems
and taste shaped by shape and size—
all very important, but over time,
what happens to the eyes?
She would say to me,
“Our love is great, but it will run its course.
I know what time will do to my boobs.”
She said this to me when our love was new!
Women are not romantic. The drinking horse
will suddenly bolt up the hill and down the hill
and disappear. And so I write this rhyme to you.
Because, as you can see,
time and rhyme combine to expound my theme on time
and poetry rather effortlessly.
Time is necessary to rhyme. Temporal is not just a cold term,
a skeleton rattling in Latin. It is what poetry is.
It is why in my poetry I deride
the stretched pictures
in the silent museum, dark and wide.