"Time/Times" by Dale Going

for Bill T. Jones, “both a provocation and a comfort"

he does love the slash/

both at once

although/not as one

Still/Here

Story/Time’s “just a minute”

its hidden wait

but time doesn’t

it’s gone and here and all at once

gone/here

till time and times are done

Yeats' yearning/searching

provocation/comfort

the climax is not the ending

the climax is hidden in the middle

buried somewhere in many pages

glaring heart-stopping surrounded

(you were the love of my life)

did I write were or are?

were/are the same

both/although not as one

we/are

I wrote

what was I

thinking?

direction

drift alone—drift normally

to maintain focus such that…

(I love especially

parenthesis

and the connective em—

and/yet

(and yet and

yes and yet…

the end that begins

Monk:

next time/make a mistake

Dale Going's 2025 books are The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster (Codhill Press Guest Editor Series award) and For the Anniversaries of All Loving Kinds of Meetings (Albion Books). Her poetry has been supported by the Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, Watermill Center, Wedding Cake House and Djerassi. Recent poems appear in Annulet, Interim, New American Writing, Mantis, Noon, Posit, Public School Poetry, VOLT, and elsewhere. She lives in Manhattan. https://linktr.ee/dalegoing