Jack Cooper

Sour Dough

Time is kept by humans
enforced by nature
When January came
and brought the rain
how perfect the timing seemed
for everything alive
and probably the dead too
and how we didn’t want it to end
since it had been a dry year
bested by a holiday gift arriving late
and your birthday lasting two weeks
because neither of us wanted it to end

We had settled into a winter rhythm
of bread making and reading
I got into evolution
the theory of quantum leaps
and you went back to your French
petit à petit on voyage loin
and the whole month blurred by
like a thirsty hummingbird
ending with winds
that tossed limbs into the street
and February slipping
a note under the door
wet and with the ink smeared
in a long and hoary message
about the coming flood and moss

Time became indeterminate
sluggish as sour dough
slow as sleeplessness
little by little like dying

Making Sense

Some things are growing
knowledge
even stars
Some things are shrinking
time
even stars

Like stars
memories grow
and then shrink
coalescing around
a few sparkly truths

I remember her bones
her long narrow fingers
making bread
her perfect jaw
her high forehead
making sense
before they were ash

I know that she loved me
I don’t know that about stars
but it must be true

Jack Cooper: I think about time, well, most of the time. It’s one of life’s and non-life’s most profound enigmas. Of course time is relative—we didn’t need science to “discover” that fact. What is time to an octopus that only lives two years, yet with one of the most remarkable brains on Earth? What is time to a mountain, which surely rises and falls, and you might say breathes and bleeds, like everything else? Are time, light, love and death all expressions of the same somethingness, the same mystical battle between syntropy and entropy? The question alone is unanswerable and unsettling, and ultimately the stuff of poetry.