On Writing to Time and "Trace"

For the last year, I have been writing letters to time. These letters are attempts to sort out a relationship that has grown more intimate and fraught as I get deeper into my life. I cherish time with growing urgency, but I am also confused by it. What is a long time? What is a moment? There have been so many hours of snow falling through my life, but I can barely remember any of them with true clarity. There have been so many April evenings, but most of them have slipped completely from my grasp.

My friend, poet Karin Gottshall, explained to me recently that the Ancient Greeks believed that the past was before us. This immediately made sense. We have seen the past, so of course it is in the direction we look into. And the future, unknowable, is behind us. We back into it. My own past is something I continually investigate through writing. I find my poems move forward from moments of fierce beauty in the present into moments of great pain in the past, and back again. It is in this movement that I seek integration and consolation.

In some ways all my poems are letters to time. Through them I express a pressing desire for time, and regret that I have lost so much of it. When I look forward into my lived life, there are only remnants, shadows, vestiges. Two life-changing incidents loom immensely on the landscape of my past, though each took only moments. A brief snow falling on a Christmas afternoon caused the car I was riding in to cross the center line and collide head-on with another car, killing my mother. Four decades later, kneeling on our mother’s grave in an April dusk, my brother shot himself. It is my ongoing struggle to reconcile the infinite reverberations of such moments that I am considering in “Trace.” 

Illustration by: Christian Blaza. Christian Blaza is an illustrator based in New York/ New Jersey area. He is interested in editorial, sequential, and fantasy illustrations.