Almost every line of "The Validity of Time" seems to come from a different conversation, and a reader has to reckon with that first. Mary F. C. Pratt offers no quotation marks and no explanation, only a woman called "she" and a scatter of sentences that might belong to her, to the speaker, or to both. The voice is practical one moment ("How do you know it's junk mail?"), bleak the next ("The world is hell"), then oddly comic ("The public throws umbrellas"). Judging by "She is outraged at her mind," the poem is about living alongside someone whose thinking is unravelling, and about the mix of tenderness, weariness and dread that comes with it. It never names an illness, and it is wiser not to supply one.
The structure is what holds it together. The poem opens with an instruction addressed to "you": "You should sit with her for awhile." It closes with another: "Take time to listen to her." Between them comes the shortest stanza, a single line: "Tie her boots." These commands are small, physical and domestic, and they are the only places where the poem sounds sure of itself. Everything else wobbles. The shape of the poem acts out care: stay, listen, do the practical thing, and the fragments are what you hear while you do.
Those fragments are the poem's most striking material. "Pretend is the meaning of life, / the emperor's clothes" borrows the old story of the naked ruler for a half-formed philosophy in which everyone is performing. "My children are happy they weren't eaten alive" twists relief into horror within a single breath. Then comes "Sleep, sleep, feet, feet, / personal injury," where words seem linked by sound and exhaustion rather than logic. The repeated syllables thud like a nursery rhyme and then collapse into the language of lawsuits. Sense is slipping, but a pattern of feeling survives.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Sentences are short, flat and mostly end-stopped, and there are almost no connecting words, no "because" or "so," so each line sits alone like a stone on a table. That bareness makes the occasional jolt of slang land hard: "The spiritual wise man bitches" cuts a lofty phrase down to size in four words. The one word that keeps returning is "time." It is the title's subject, then a blunt claim ("Time is valid"), then a warning ("It is time to worry about death"), and finally something to be given away ("Take time to listen"). It shifts from fact to fear to gift.
The imagery stays close to the ground. There are boots, shoes, feet, "tracks," stairs and a house, so the poem is full of walking and of what happens underfoot. She "stares at SUV tail lights," watching a busy world drive off, while another line complains, "Must you dance in my tracks?", as if someone is following too closely. "She sings to her shoes" is both tender and absurd, a person looking down and finding the only audience that will not argue. The ending moves outward to a "dilapidated house," which may be a house, may be a body or mind (the poem only suggests it), and in which she sings anyway. The last two commands, "Clear the snow garden. / Dig a hole under the stairs," are the most unsettling. One is ordinary housework and the other could mean burial or hiding, and the poem leaves the connection unexplained.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses both pity and mockery. It lets her speech stay strange and lets the caregiver stay tired, and it still insists that the strangeness deserves attention. The claim "Time is valid" can be read as stubborn defiance: even when a mind scrambles its sentences, the hours she lives through count. Rather than explain her, the poem asks the reader to do what its first and last lines ask, which is to sit down and listen for a while.