𝗕𝗿𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘀

𝘣𝘺 𝘛𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘛𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘨𝘦

Spending a rainy day on the same creek

in a hollow of the Niagara Escarpment,

a mouse can hear time speed and slow down

in the continuous sound of the water

hitting glossy creek rocks.

A sapient hiker on the Bruce Trail

might say that time is not variable,

but a in late-March a mouse knows

that the mosses and bulb flowers

grow by the hour, watersheds and water tables

infusing tiny stems too young to track the sun

between the bare twigs of the overcast canopy.

Mice know that time moves with runoff and rain.

Mice being objective observers of time.

And hikers being subjective creatures

touring the trails on rims of timetables

or abstracted unaccountable authorities

that replace the owls peering down

from those leafless wet bowers above.

---

Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, Gray Sparrow, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, AoHaM, Canadian Woman Studies, The Mathematical Intelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.