we open time

 

 

 

 
I saw to the south a man walking.

 He was breaking ground in perfect silence.

 He wore a harness and pulled a plow. 

His feet trod his figure's blue shadow,

 and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. 

He turned back as if to check the furrow, 

or as if he heard a call. 

 

Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. 

This man walked slowly with a spade, 

and turned the green ground under.

 

Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking,

 the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season,

 peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under,

 and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. 

No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. 

The green fields grow up forgetting.

Ours is a planet sown in beings.

 Our generations overlap like shingles.

 We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall.

 Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe,

 most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time

 like a path in the grass. 

 

We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.

 

There were no formerly heroic times, 

and there was no formerly pure generation. 

There is no one here but us chickens, 

and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful,

 knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful,

 and self-aware: a people who scheme, promote, 

deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones,

 and long to flee misery and skip death. 

 

It is a weakening and discolouring idea,

 that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time –

 or even knew selflessness or courage or literature – 

but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available

 to everyone in every age. 

 

There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.

 

 

 

 

~ Annie Dillard

from For the Time Being