Dancing through life

The Time Factor

The intermediate tape-worm of time unreels
Unwinds and stops dead.

The secret here is that this garden’s spell
Is for all time, the magic spilling over
From the grip of the dark abysm.
Here are impressed crannied deep
More than the eyes avow;
Carved telltales to bemuse the wary,
Jaded, and unseeing. It is thus, not any
Absence here nor time’s toll
But love’s bafflement, impaled,
No brave hands may set free.
Perhaps, in another moon or bloom
This play for feeling could well have been 
Mere obeisance to some monarch’s lust,
A prodigous lush screening such
Stealthy crevices, swelling into the 
Dark incandescence of bodies, for
Right here and now, your impetous blaze,
Announces: love will, for the proper
Reason, for whatever reason,
Even as strong as flashflood signs warn
The face is wrong in this confused season,
You and I meet, at the wrong time,
Giants both standing above time,
Playing for time, loving against time,
Time living at the midpoint
And the crux of timelessness.

You could have been Wu Ti
Scrounging from the plums
And berries of riper order
Or his simpling sibling, and I,
Strangely, of one silla’s starry-bosomed-
Maidens, sybillize, dancing to a
Different time in a warmer clime,
Recreacting an ethos more ancient than
Your cry: I want you in anywhere or
Way or how, now or in another time:
Your voice thrusts the message in,
In this cold age, while the arms
Seek warmth in another face
In a gesture, not yours,
But which could have been were years,
To shuttle to and forward, forth
Floating towards time , towards this suspended
Moment in no imagined space.

Two age-wrenched passions meet, miss
Time’s cues, mistake time’s script,
And if time were out today, who cares?
Nevermind the lapse in history
And in place. Out there may well
Be right here and in the heart of Seoul.
In this soul, in the heart of this
Garden secret to all else, set against
The mose luminous of skies, proclaiming
This is perfect, only You and I
Suddenly meeting and for no reason
Except the most holding; it is not right?
We meet, want, limn in each other’s
Fictive flesh an allegory of our kind
Of love, conceived and born in this garden
From the past, and of this single moment,
And for the many more centuries to come.

(Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta)