DOWN-SLIPPING Time, sweet, swift, and shallow stream, <br />Here, like a boulder, lies this afternoon <br />Across your eager flow. So you shall stay, <br />Deepened and dammed, to let me breathe and be. <br />Your troubled fluency, your running gleam <br />Shall pause, and circle idly, still and clear: <br />The while I lie and search your glassy pool <br />Where, gently coiling in their lazy round, <br />Unseparable minutes drift and swim, <br />Eddy and rise and brim. And I will see <br />How many crystal bubbles of slack Time <br />The mind can hold and cherish in one Now! <br /> <br />Now, for one concious vacancy of sense, <br />The stream is gathered in a depening pond, <br />Not a mere moving mirror. Through the sharp <br />Correct reflection of the standing scene <br />The mind can dip, and cleanse itself with rest, <br />And see, slow spinning in the lucid gold, <br />Your liquid notes, imperishable Time. <br /> <br />It cannot be. The runnel slips away: <br />The clear smooth downward sluice begins again, <br />More brightly slanting for that trembling pause, <br />Leaving the sense its conscious vague unease <br />As when a sonnet flashes on the mind, <br />Trembles and burns an instant, and is gone.<br /><br />Christopher Morley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/only-a-matter-of-time-3/
