Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Olson

Olson turns a nuisance into a metronome and, in doing so, tips his hand about what kind of attention the poem is trying to teach. The “small snow” sets the scale: not apocalypse, not postcard, just a modest weathering of the world. Against that quiet backdrop, “I count the blessings” could read like piety, but Olson immediately sabotages any Hallmark uplift by blessing a “leak in the faucet.” The subtext is almost combative: gratitude isn’t reserved for the picturesque; it’s earned by the stubborn, repetitive facts of a day.

The strongest move is the phrase “makes of the sink time.” It’s a tiny act of metaphysics smuggled into plumbing. A sink is supposed to be purely functional, the place where time gets washed off (dishes, hands, evidence). Olson reverses it: the sink becomes an hourglass, the leak a clock you can’t turn off. That’s very Olson, whose project-poem sensibility insists that form comes from the physical world’s pressures, not from inherited lyric prettiness. The line breaks keep it unspooling, clause after clause, like the drip itself: thought as continuous measure.

“the drop of the water on water” lands as both sound and philosophy. One droplet doesn’t change the basin, yet it registers - insistently - as contact, recurrence, presence. The intent feels less like consolation than calibration: a poet resetting his instruments, choosing to hear time where others hear annoyance, choosing to see blessing where others see repair.