Time Lapse

Sarah Webb

November 19, 2021

Clouds slide above the lake, flat-bottomed cumulus 

that puff custard at the top and presage storm. They shadow

the white-capped water; they lift past the hills and travel on.

If we were to set a camera to catch them for the day,

we'd see them speed past, dissipate, then edge back in,

lines of white following the currents of the sky,

and if we kept on filming, a week, a month, a year,

the air would flicker—white gray blue, rain sun fog—

clouds blinking into being and passing on.

Decades would show us winter, dim, wind from the north,

summer glare slapping from waves—a perpetual pattern,

days lengthening and shortening in their season.

A hundred years might pass, morse code of light and dark,

and then more, a blur like a stream photographed at twilight,

whose current turns to mist flowing between forest stones.

Beneath the ever-changing torrent of the sky, windows

glisten on the far shore. Their lamps pulse the dark,

flashes and shadows on a quiver of water.

In centuries, lights outline the growing sand, then cluster high

and haze the night. They fade, give way to a necklace of light

faint through heavy trees along a twist of canyon.

Now, gaps in the string, and now a single gleam under the stars.

A firefly on a river bank, dark and bright, dark and light,

it lasts its moment, before the trees close round it, black.

Night comes and then day, storm and then sun, the years stream,

and all the long passing, the clouds sweep over.

Sarah Webb co-edits the Zen magazine Just This. Her collection Black (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) was named a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her Red Riding Hood's Sister (Purple Flag, 2018) was also short-listed for the Oklahoma Book Award. She posts at bluebirdsw.blogspot.com