Lauren K. Carlson

Clock Time Versus Felt Time

I’m wondering why I went so long without—

but waiting is also a way to measure
and measurement turns imagined realities, such as time,

because it’s true isn’t it,
that time is perception, mostly,
sensible through light and motion, cosmic, planetary
some combination of belief and matter, much like faith,

into blocks
that is the hours, they are comprised of minutes broken into seconds,
which aren’t broken at all, until they’re notched by the clock’s
hands and then struck, the striking is what marks them, these blocks
called time

—why I went so long with comfort.

                                                            *

I devoted myself to deprivation. Suffering I marked, deprivation like a clock hand.
That consistent ticking. A shelter.
It’s repetitions. A shelter.

My small suffering a purposeful—punishment?

No, a discipline and these mimic one another. Not punitive.
Rather, out of my endurance arrived a habit.

How much like a blanket, covering. A soft noise,
a wool cloak. Amid the wind and the waves.

Lauren K. Carlson is a poet and spiritual director living in Manistee, Michigan. She is the author of Animals I Have Killed (Comstock Review’s Chapbook Prize 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover, and Waxwing. In 2022 she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her manuscript in progress. Her writing has been supported by Tin House, Napa Valley Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers Conference. She currently serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

https://www.laurenkcarlson.com/