“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
– “Birches” by Robert Frost
Let me tell you something,
you young, climbing whipper-snappers:
when you get old, you’ll want to slow it all down.
You’ll want to use all the words, all of them.
You’ll want to roll them out like carpets,
like unfurling cottonwood branches, unhurried.
But you can’t, you see,
because there just isn’t time.
There isn’t time.
And I wonder now about all that time we saved,
the minutes we didn’t squander,
a slow pining away we didn’t even believe in?
All the shorthand, efficiencies, time savers,
all the multi-tasking life hacks.
We needed the next thing ASAP
because we were feeling FOMO
for just about
everything.
We were so LOL!
Where does all that time live now, Mr. Thrifty?
What was it all saved for?
All the broad, ample words we could have, should have used.
Maybe we could’ve been more explicit, more manifest.
And if we could get back all that time
we so diligently preserved with our contractions and abbreviations…
the kind of slow time a tree can use
to shoulder us in its arms, our branches holding its branches,
limbs full with the weight of all our saved time,
the slow-thriving tree we once climbed.
There’s nothing brief or abbreviated about a tree.
We could take our time, climbing the hours like we were 9 or 10,
as light as the leaves.
Did you come from the trees?
All spring, summer and fall—climbing trees?
Tell me about the trees. Spare no words.