flashquake Editor's Picks flashquake This piece is a rush of images and images strung together so skillfully that I didn't even notice it was contained within one sentence. Beautiful in construction and in words. |
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 When on a morning-night a boy turns up to his mother, sees between the sun and moon a face in whose pores he seeks truth, asks why is a minute sixty seconds? and when she extends her beautiful hands and feels around in his utterance for the gaps between syllables, the inflection squeezed out of his wrinkled brow, the syntax of piercing eyes, and when in these moments she sees the pre-figuring of all that he will come to know on his own: that our clock system inherits from the Babylonians, that because their mathematics worked in base sixty it was the natural way to divide time, that no numeral system, not their sexagesimal one, nor our decimal one, could ever measure the only kind of time that matters, could ever create a tick-tick-tick in tune with all we really know about time, that it is the distance felt between our selves and our desires, and when she knows that not long from now he will find years between parting eyes and meeting lips, will find his emotions stuttered, suspended, stretched, stripped in an instant, will find in someone’s sleep-breath units of time so strange and wonderful that he will know that he and his lover are always beginning, and in order to begin always reaching infinitely back to that primordial sense of time, she can only answer no minute is sixty seconds. |
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