Time Travelers

by Brian Seiler

Time is wilderness
this we have learned out here pulling threads of the universe
marking the years in the bark of the gingko
laughing, calling Look, hieroglyphs! at old scrawls from our own hand

We gather on occasion, this band of brooding scar dust
for the unfinished business of bewildered new arrivals
so surprised as lifelong propaganda clears from the eyes
They have waded broken and barefoot up swollen November rivers

Pleasantries and then we spill into the peeling and weathered skiff
with a deck sunk into the funk of the forest floor
still minding shins on the bent hull
old habits
old artists
who lobbed pleas aflame into the
ticking abyss with no response but a faint shrug

Poets blind and dead lightly row

Time is wilderness
this we have learned
out here, having shed circadian rhythms
to trace, for easy centuries, names etched in the hull to the final cursive loop

On shore, our Victorian, the walking cloud of graphite, wheezes a joke about his teeth
made from the crust of a long forgotten moon

Time is wilderness
this we have learned
slogging through the fens of memory and hailing the crows who know us
and know our joy—a migratory bird who splashes color into the drab hedge

As the twilight and time travelers
exhale a unified sigh, you ask are we a graveyard
No—we are, of a sort, comet trails

left callously behind but intent on riding gravity
to safe harbors

For now we traverse this land for which

there are no metaphors

only held moments—
as in years ago when the grid failed
and we stayed in while the world melted
enjoying the rustling of the sheets, the shadows, the sycamore

Now the new arrivals recall their final nights in the quiet dark—
we hear of straw peasant beds on the winter solstice
bubbling kettles in a drafty pioneer cabin
a boy freezing to death in the woods on his seventh birthday

Time is wilderness

this we have learned

And then it is finished and all depart
unceremoniously from the clearing
as the lanterns float into the distance
for the long period
as comets intent on the Oort


***