TIME PROBLEM

1 August 2026

Aug 01, 2026

Thirty-eight percent of Americans describe ourselves as “always feeling rushed,” something Brenda Hillman addresses directly in the following poem.

Much of my own work is intended as an antidote to that unremitting urgency and haste—what some have called “hurry sickness”—a gentle invitation to pause a moment, to slow down and listen.

See especially In Praise of Listening: A Gathering of Stories (2023), and World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (2011), both available on my website: www.christianmcewen.com or at the link below.

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“Time Problem” by Brenda Hillman (b.1951)

The problem
of time.          Of there not being   
enough of it.

My girl came to the study
and said Help me;
I told her I had a time problem   
which meant:
I would die for you but I don’t have ten minutes.   
Numbers hung in the math book   
like motel coathangers. The Lean   
Cuisine was burning
like an ancient city: black at the edges,   
bubbly earth tones in the center.   
The latest thing they’re saying is lack   
of time might be
a “woman’s problem.” She sat there   
with her math book sobbing—
(turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers   
dangle in little nooses)
Hawking says if you back up far enough   
it’s not even
an issue, time falls away into
'the curve' which is finite,
boundaryless. Appointment book,   
soprano telephone—
(beep End beep went the microwave)

The hands fell off my watch in the night.
I spoke to the spirit
who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing   
they invented. Had wakened from a big
dream of love in a boat
No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face   
lived for months in my dresser,
no arrows
for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio   
nose         (before the lie)
left in the center;            the watch
didn’t have twenty minutes; neither did I.
My girl was doing
her gym clothes by herself;         (red leaked
toward black, then into the white
insignia)                  I was grading papers,
heard her call from the laundry room:   
Mama?
Hawking says there are two
types of it,
real and imaginary (imaginary time must be   
like decaf), says it’s meaningless
to decide which is which
but I say: there was tomorrow-
and-a-half
when I started thinking about it; now   
there’s less than a day. More
done. That’s
the thing that keeps being said. I thought   
I could get more done as in:
fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller   
archon, then push-push-push
the tired-tired around the track like a planet.   
Legs, remember him?
Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .   
Hawking says
there are little folds in time
(actually he calls them wormholes)
but I say:
there’s a universe beyond
where they’re hammering the brass cut-outs .. .
Push us out in the boat and leave time here—         

(because: where in the plan was it written,   
You’ll be too busy to close parentheses,
the snapdragon’s bunchy mouth needs water,   
even the caterpillar will hurry past you?
Pulled the travel alarm
to my face: the black
behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark   
from being ruined. Opened   
the art book
—saw the languorous wrists of the lady
in Tissot’s “Summer Evening.” Relaxed. Turning   
gently. The glove
(just slightly—but still:)   
“aghast”;
opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed   
into a fourth dimension   
but I say
space thought it up, as in: Let’s make
a baby space, and then
it missed. Were seconds born early, and why   
didn’t things unhappen also, such as
the tree became Daphne. . .

At the beginning of harvest, we felt
the seven directions.
Time did not visit us. We slept
till noon.
With one voice I called him, with one voice   
I let him sleep, remembering
summer years ago,
I had come to visit him in the house of last straws   
and when he returned
above the garden of pears, he said
our weeping caused the dew. . .

I have borrowed the little boat
and I say to him Come into the little boat,   
you were happy there;

the evening reverses itself, we’ll push out   
onto the pond,
or onto the reflection of the pond,   
whichever one is eternal

Write about time, and how you engage with it. Borrow a line or two from Hillman’s poem, “the hands fell off my watch in the night…” “real and imaginary time” …”I thought I could get more done…” and see what is asking to emerge.

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ONGOING EVENTS WITH CHRISTIAN

World Enough & Time:

Writing & Meditation, Creativity & Slowing Down

For more than eight years, a small group of us have been meeting via Zoom one evening a week. We’ve recently celebrated our 250th gathering! Each session begins with a brief meditation, followed by a reading and discussion (Ada Limón, Jane Hirshfield, Ocean Vuong…) after which everyone writes for 25-30 minutes. How did that go? For the last fifteen minutes we listen to what each other has to say.

Thursday evenings: 6:15pm to 8:15pm EST via Zoom