by Lisa Harris
Zero holds a place of absence, a mid-point between plus one and minus one. Look closely at a pie, a cake, a world—things we cut up. Once made, they cannot be enlarged, but they can be shared in different parts, in different pieces, in different chunks. Time, amorphous and precise, teases us as it stretches beyond us, measures us by ticks and tocks, speaking a language of ticking and tocking. We are zero—a place of absence and presence, a mid-point between eternity and before now. We set time traps, for each other and for ourselves. We call them deadlines, milestones, anniversaries, paydays, Sabbaths, birthdays, national holidays, elections, weekends, and funerals. Zero, naught, zilch, zip, ought: we leave and never arrive, as Zeno predicted, reductio ad absurdum, whenever we reach where we have been, we still have farther to go, no tortoise needed in this race, absurdly running and never arriving until Death reaches out and snatches us. Prior to that moment, we are arrows—in a motionless moment—fixed on a spinning point called time.
From COUNTING: In Pursuit of a Common Wholeness, collection in progress
Category: SNHU Creative Writing, SNHU online creative writing