The Time Machine by Jane Zwart

The Time Machine

When at last we invent it, the time machine

won’t have any flash—not forward, not back—

but this will be only one disappointment

among many: that an hour will be as leaden as ever;

that the novel vehicle won’t work like an elevator,

obliterating stories, or like the subway

that draws a blank on the blocks between stations.

If anything, it will resemble a pump trolley—

sure, upgraded with a lever for time travelers

to throw, a switch to send them backward

not onward, but our trips will be as ponderous

as always; a time machine can reverse course,

but it can’t erase duration. To say it plain:

there will be no having anything back

unless we take back the whole, such that the dead

will be raised by mourning withershins

and lepers reknit a finger at a time. The news

is no better for those who would reach the future

faster. The engineers working on the express

say it can't be done. More time elapses in naps,

they say, than on the cars we have no choice

but to seesaw into next. Worse still, the tidings

for those who would tarry: our only choices

are clockwise and counter-, in real time;

for interrupting the machine’s inexorable crawl,

no physicist knows the math.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025.