PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

". . . figured in the drift of stars . . .
reconciled among the stars."
---T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, II

This is the tale offered by an old Poet, Sundial,
to his adolescent lover, Gnomen, for his amusement;
after a summer night of intimate, naked revelry.

The age of the relic we are about to describe

cannot be calculated with the usual precision;

its obsolescence is far too ancient,

so much more its origin.
Even the alignment of the local stars
would have been so very different than what we observe.

Time is only the sentient perception
of the motion of earth, and moon, and the stars;
and the progress of the seasons.
But these are neither confected, affected, nor effected
by the definition, perception, or measurement of time.

The theory of how to halt the perception of time,
and to stall, or even eliminate, all the
ravages and inconveniences
that time was believed to engender,
was constructed by some very expert mathematicians
who specialized in the obscure variations
of algebras and geometries from which
the components of the theory were uncovered.
Three more generations passed before
an enterprising engineer invented the device
that translated the theory into practical
and workable reality. A rather obscure poet
suggested to the cooperative engineer
that he should design the mechanism according to
certain metaphorical representations of time.

He placed it atop a massively high tower

(taller and wider than that world's highest mountain)
on a circular platform open to the sunset's light.
Look at those metallic horizontal and vertical supports---
untarnished still after all these millenia.
The mesh of reciprocal gears, driven by
opposing nanoactivity invisible to the multitude
of documeted senses, is an archaic testimony
to real skill. This mechanism, we must remember,
did not interfere with solar, stellar, terran and lunar motions,
but only with those imposed interpretations of them
as causes of the perception of time.
But the stoppage of the perception of time affected
each and every one of the perceivers then living.
so that they were immobilized in the very moment
of inactivation, so to call it, and in whatever posture
that moment had found them, their bodies failed, and rotted.
We found what was left of many skeletons,
some huddling in what must have been the shadow of the tower.
We have catalogued and categorized all of them---
although what we have retrieved after such dilligence
would not even fill half of a cargo hold on one of our spacecraft.
We had hitherto considered this planet unremarkable---
the third in orbit around an insignificant star,
and very much resembling the fourth, for color, climate,
and uninhabitable desolation. And yet
the presence of those skeletons suggest---and even insist---
that their planet possessed a much different surface
in what they perceived as their time, which they halted
with the most uninformed awareness of consequences;
such skill without knowledge, and acumen without wisdom.
We cannot restart their perception of time;
no one and nothing for whom to restart it at all.

This account of antiquated archaeological discovery,
was found in an ancient archive gathered

by beings that once transversed this galactic section;

sentiences that actually inhabited corporeal bodies;

and believed by certain heretics among us

to have been our primitive ancestors.
The student of such an obscure era must realize

that the events therein described cannot be verified

(making reasonable the conjecture of a hoax); and

that the planet---of which the archaic writer reported---

no longer exists; and even the star it once orbited

is now only a lightless cinder of densely compressed unimportance.

Starward