On Time: Bound and Unbound

an ekphrastic, with thanks to “The Circle Game,” by Joni Mitchell 

By Eloise Allan Crittenden

Published in The Muse, edition nº2

I have a time obsession. Or maybe, time has an obsession with me. 

It seems to follow me everywhere I go, telling me what to do—and when. It tells me when to wake up, since I don’t have the privilege of waking with my body. It tells me when I have to be, where I need to be. It suggests when I should eat dinner. It nudges me to sleep. Time has bound me to it. It has held me captive. Or maybe, I have let it. 

We are captive on a carousel of time

Not linear, a carousel. Not simply forwards, a carousel. But somehow, somewhere in-between. The question is, how to get on this carousel? The circles must slow and a portal must open. And, the circles are everywhere. They are the omnipresent beings of time. 

They are, they make, the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The days, the months, the years. These are the circles that hold me captive. These are the prescribed carousels of time. 

But, they are, they make, the air we breath, the phases of the moon and the seasons. 

And the seasons, they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down

The natural carousels of time. And, it is on these carousels that prescribed time dissolves. These carousels don’t simply go round and round, but they go up and down.

This November day, this prescribed circle, whimpered under the beings of the seasons. Orange ombre ornaments, subjected to the whispers of the wind's secrets, jingled. Some secrets were so heavy, gravity took hold. But the ornaments took swirling paths, committed to keeping the wind’s secrets of air there. Suspended.  

The rising heat from charcoaled streets held them partially in limbo. And the circle slowed under the will of the mind of the imaginative.  Our minds seek these moments of limbo and hold us in them, even just for the time it takes a leaf to fall from a tree. Our minds slow the circles. But to use this power wisely is ever so important. And not to abuse it. For everything is in a constant state of precarious flux, and that is not something that can be controlled in its entirety. So accept the moments of slowness when they come, for they will find you and you them. These are meditative moments of gratitude, of sadness, of wherever you are–unbound by time.  

We can’t return, we

can only look

Behind from where

we came

And go ‘round and

‘round and ‘round

In the circle game