Chronophyte

True realization,

understanding, always comes

by accident, by accident like

“without undergoing”,

“without brain racking”, and by accident like

“hop!”

On that morning, waiting

for my wife on Freedom Square,

I closed my eyes,

and in the din of traffic I recognized

the churning of a water mill here,

I turned to face Harju Gate

and politely made space for a boy

leaning over Haymarket Well

for a drink, and I hopped two steps back

to let a taxi turn into the lot.

Throughout all my books I’ve sought

the shape of time.

I don’t rummage in the past just for fun,

in pursuit of sweetly throbbing pain,

don’t use sentimental little scenes

to register readers in the writing.

(Although they are… and all in all,

what do I have against them?)

I listened to the frogs in the moat

and cocked my ears,

wondering if I could hear waves in the sands of the square,

but no, that… thread –

exactly, a thread – was weak or was broken,

though it existed: a hypha, a mushroom-thread,

and I myself exist within time,

like in a mushroom underground.

But it is a mushroom, it is time,

just like how considering it is convenient.

I’m not posing it to anyone

as a universal truth.

But with mushroom-threads,

time-threads, chronophytes,

even right there on Victory…

I mean Freedom Square,

I’m connected to a host of ages.

I imagine them, I live them and within them

no less realistically

than I do recalling that morning

right now. My relationship to

time is the same as

that of the birch and the milkcap

I am

chronophytes.