Cover image by Marla Allison.
Click to purchase.
My day suddenly veered into a collection of new and old poems by A. Robert Lee. I didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be nothing less than a curriculum for life and learning, for pleasure, and for the intellect. The author notes that it had “a brief earlier incarnation from a small UK indie press, now long defunct.” This new edition “reworks and expands the original version, and includes new additional poems.”
It begins by invoking Jorge Luis Borges (“Our language is so saturated and animated by time”); Tennessee Williams (“Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitable fatal operation”); and since I am reporting this accurately, though I’d rather not say, it also invokes yours truly (“Leaning on the elbow of eternity, / you say there is nothing — not the leafy / green cathedral of trees, nor rich scent / of pine in the air — but space and shadows”). The first poem launches the collection like so:
• • •
World Enough and Time
I
You wizard, you bastard.
You unbanishable thief.
Yes, I’m talking to you.
Face to face.
TIME, Time, Time.
I don’t care whether you’re an arrow,
or a loop-back, a reverse, a spiral.
Sure, kin to gravity, water, air.
Inexorable Metronomic.
I’d like to say —
time, your time’s up.
But you know, I know, better.
I insist. I plot. I plan.
You’re not getting away with it.
But actually you are getting away with it.
Without pause, without respite.
You’ve donned your guises
as Father Time often enough,
fond old gent with beard, hourglass and scythe.
You’ve slotted into cliché
like the sands of time.
But you’re not fooling anyone.
You’ve got more time than any of us,
a profligate, a big spender.
Timing, it’s said, it everything.
You always know just how
to time your appearance, to come onstage.
Because, mini-second or aeon,
you have always been on your own time.
The poem runs to a dozen sections, its language plain spoken, its idiom an array of categories ranging from astronomy and mathematics to archeology and cosmology, from chronology, geography, and architecture to history and ecology, from literature to medicine, and to a thousand other topics — all in service to an encyclopedic rhetoric of wisdom. But that’s just the beginning. Other poems continue the collection: “Self-Time,” “Art’s Time, “Sporting Time,” “Time Was,” “Time Is,” concluding with a short “Epilogue.” Read them all and smile. They will make your day, as they did mine.
Leave a Reply