Distillations: Visions of Time

Around here, March is when spring starts making its tentative appearance. If fall and winter are about remembering the past, spring is all about the future. In many ways, this idea of change is where science fiction began. What will happen next? What will the world be like if X happens? What will we be like if Y happens? These visions can be wonderful or terrifying or both all at the same time. This column will explore both the idea of the future and explorations with the idea of time itself.

This month’s poems come from Star*Line Issue #30.5, the official journal of The Science Fiction Poetry Association. However, these poems represent only a few of the themes contained within the publication.

First, we have two poems that explore the importance of time. In “At the End of Time” by Darrell Schweitzer, neither the title nor the first line of the poem, “Dying at last,” provide a positive image of the future. The poem details the death of a time traveler who is facing his own personal “end,” as well as the implication that he has traveled far into the future. In doing so, he shows the loneliness and isolation of someone dying away from home “in a strange bed, perhaps / beneath a bloody red sun.” One of this poem’s strengths is its vivid description of a final dream:

two faded white flowers,
day following night like the flapping
of a black wing…

A question for the reader is whether it matters that the distance is in time rather than space and how much this new dimension adds to the poem. This question is not answered, but rather added to with another question in the last stanza:

Did he have the answer?
He has not returned.

“Our Cemetery for Chronology” by Stacy Cowley has quite a different mood. Although it begins with an image of an execution, the first line has a somewhat whimsical feel: “We dragged the day out to the firing range at twilight,” and it ends with a final joke “…Another day shot.” This lightheartedness is also shown with a play on words involving the day’s death “…Some days are like that. It went quietly.” This may be dark humor, but it is humor nonetheless. A mystery is introduced with the lines “This Tuesday is the twenty-third day we’ve / killed so far this year—and it’s only April.” What makes some days different? No answer is provided in the poem which concentrates on making the link between the cemetery and the death of days more real: “…We / mark the days with stones and twig, but the markers blow away…”

“End of the World” by Jaime Lee Moyer is about exactly what the title proclaims. There are no last minute tricks or plays on words. This is it, and all the characters in the poem are aware of it even if some of them are still trying to find a way out: “Down in the square brash young men / make plans for a way around fate.” Despite the very real doom, the poem begins by introducing the main character who has a sense of peace about her:

Anya sits in a window above the fray
waiting for the end of the world…
though she’s in no rush to be numb.

At the end, the first two lines are repeated with the resolution that “his promise she won’t be alone, / promising there’s still time, / even at the end of the world.” Indeed, there are far worse ways for the world to end.

Finally, there is Danny Adams’s “World Lost Under” which takes a down-to-earth experience, that of flooding land for a reservoir, and gives it an alternative world twist:

In dreams I watch me in a world unlost:
farming twenty acres ringed by oaks
whose stumps are seen in my reality
only in drought

This simple premise is elaborated throughout; two possible futures based on a turning point in the past “rather than all my kin kicked out / by ’42 when the city built its dam.” Adams vividly portrays life as it might have been “This other me in this valley not drowned / tips his hat, wishes me a good day, then mindfully gets about his father’s business.” This “might have been” scenario examines the present as simply one future chosen by a decision in the past.

Once again, speculative poetry performs the same vital function as its fictional cousin—the exploration of new dimensions, what could be, and what might have been. There may not be any clear answers, but the exploration of the questions is a good beginning.