what time carries
4 poems by Todd Swift
After Death, What Words?
The true things are where the heart is most hurt,
As beneath the dirt an isolated bulb is roseate;
What we hate to hear or hold, loss without end
Is beautiful for being absolute – pitiless as ice –
Ice that the sun destroys. Death lends itself to us,
The book with the least lies, the longest pages
Which (uncut, we hope, for awhile) reads us our
Lives, to rise like a tree aching for cold light
Through each knife of wind, each night chapter.
The Time Capsule
The time capsule is buried
under the playground
where none of the children
who put it there
will ever find it.
Already they’ve grown
and gone. Weeds occupy
most of the rest of the park
open on both sides to streets
warned by yellow police boards
about locking doors, burglaries.
Nearby, a man with blood
across his shirt gestures
out to anyone,
pressed by some unclear need;
a prescription to be filled.
The ground is empty where
the filthy scratched mosaic lies,
promising to be exploded
later, decades on; blue and red
tiles to be broken outwards, presumably,
as if after an earthquake
or eruption. After such local damage
who will remain to peer in
and lift the dull, light box
so distantly prepared – as if
some ancient egg uncovered –
to crack the little seal
and expose the quaint contents to air.
What did they think important?
How can it matter now?
Just as real religion ossifies
to small myth, given enough years
to mortify, these items shift –
have shifted – crumbling
in meaning, more than shape,
like some house tilting at the base.
Will an old child gasp or gape?
CDs, laptops, magazines with celebrities
wedded – bliss either too different to touch
or simply the same in glummer hues.
Similar to a poem, this capsule –
some work, some won’t,
as days, years, pile on
the dust and obfuscation of newness.
New things replace, not bridge, the old
in our affections. Who loves
archaic engineering now? Some do –
always the backwards glance
accrues, with interest,
a small balance, keeping due
some valuation of what’s gone before.
Not often. Today, tens of years to go
before this flat vault
gets knocked open, the silt
and sulk of expectant history is listless.
Men with arm ink
out of prison or a war
storm past with cans of lager
in their fists, barking
about the EU, half-lit
with rage and inconsequence.
So much unimportance packed
tightly into these boroughs’
inner streets. Window boxes wilt
or feature dirt bearing nothing –
not even the stalks of a perennial;
the drunk who rents the flat
the ledge goes with
never planted anything at all.
Which raises an image:
of the capsule rising
(Titanic) from the crater,
only to be found void –
the gift packed in at the end
of that last century mere
emptiness displaying nature’s
enemy – the box just
another casket to be used
by any of those who bothered
to turn up, and attend, in that place
which is also here
the squalid unveiling, the farce,
of bearing time up and out
like clutter, to us, as if it could be made
like some tool or artistic object –
to have a purpose
more good, less terrifying –
educational, even edifying –
when what each standing
person by the rip in the earth has learned
going from child to shaking age
is that what time carries
across time
is loss.
Husbandry
Against the door of glass
She placed her skin, pressed,
Eyes upon the changing there.
Her husband, then, strongly,
Had spent his labour on ground
Belonging, through years, to them;
Once, only coming home when found
By a local boy who knew where
To lead his knackered body on;
Laid him by the door, ran, stopped,
Looked back with door-knock thrown
From his hand that scurried stone;
She’d opened on to him and sky,
Black apart from where it broke
Open into light, a visitant kind
Now like reminding rain; he years dead.
Rarely, in the long bed, before
Work, at four, blue early in,
Both would struggle to undo love;
Making sounds in the room
Unheard otherwise, bold shouting,
Then a pelting silence, settling back.
Soon after, rain visited the land;
A hired axe-heaver, daily,
Bringing the apple blossoms down.
excerpted from Todd’s new book, Mainstream Love Hotel:
These days
These are the days
not other days
these are the days I was
working towards
as other farther weeks,
working for days
that now I see have come in,
fish from the street
sold fresh, the man
in his whites, ringing to bring
fish just off the boats,
days that were in the sea
not so long ago
not brought home to me
I’d thought to have my work
done by now, to have reached
the goals set out long ago,
I won’t ever get there now
no need to, here, see
what was earned, not owed,
these days of you and me
more than pensions, savings,
toil, long hours, ever bring,
days beginning with us in bed
and ending with us asleep -
between is the time worked
on, to make, and keep
no other days
no other ways
these are them, here,
in the basket, glinting like coins,
fish fresh and shining from the sea
