"Out here" is an odd way to begin a poem about the whole Universe, since in many accounts of an expanding cosmos there is no edge to stand on. But the speaker's confidence is the point. From this impossible vantage, "time flows into itself," like a river bending back to drink from its own source. The rest of the poem tries to describe time without a before and after. Its central idea is that time is not a line but a single living thing, one body that grows, changes shape, and holds all its moments at once.
The middle of the poem is built on paradox, and the language is deliberately plain. "All events are both disjunct and simultaneous" sounds like a sentence from a textbook, and that flat, declarative tone makes the contradictions more unsettling. The phrase "at the same time" does the most work. First it means literal simultaneity: "everything happens at the same time." Then it returns as the last line of the stanza, after each event has been sealed in its own "time capsule," and now means "yet also." A time capsule is meant to carry the past into the future, but here every capsule is "separated from all other times," so nothing is delivered anywhere. The stanza ends on the very phrase it has been bending, and the idiom itself becomes the paradox.
The next stanza tightens the knot. "Time goes around in circles" is a familiar image, but the poem immediately undermines it: "no event repeats yet all events are the same." A circle would at least have a starting point to return to, and this has none. "One and indistinct from itself" is a strange phrase, because nothing can be told apart from itself anyway. The poem is pointing at a sameness so complete that even the idea of comparison collapses. Then the register shifts. "A growing body of time, / a growing body of space" repeats its structure and swaps one word, which fuses the two ideas. "Body" is the key word here. It carries the poem from abstraction toward flesh, and it echoes the "growing edge" of the first line, so the Universe starts to seem like an organism rather than a stage.
The last stanza completes that shift. Time becomes "one and many-jointed," like a limb or an insect's leg, and then comes the poem's boldest image, the "ambi-morphous amoeba." The word is invented, and it plays on "amorphous." An amoeba is about as shapeless as life gets, but "ambi-" suggests both sides at once, so this creature is shapeless and doubly shaped. It pushes "its liquid body into butterfly's flight," which suggests metamorphosis, but the poem refuses a tidy before-and-after. The sounds hold the sequence together: "liquid" picks up the earlier "flows," and "propelling" in the second line comes back as "propulsion" in the last. The final line says the amoeba's "mouth is corded into wingtip's propulsion," as if feeding and flying were one tendon pulled tight. The cord suggests that the earliest, lowliest stage and the most airborne one are physically connected, and that nothing in time is ever really cut off.
Formally, this is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The poem uses sound and repetition instead. The stanzas run two, five, five and four lines, so the poem swells in the middle and then tapers. There is no full stop anywhere, and the last line simply stops, which fits a poem about motion without endings. Almost nothing is capitalized except "Universe." One reading is that this flattens every moment to the same rank, so no line, like no event, outranks the others. That is an interpretation, not something the text states.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it handles an idea that is hard to picture. It does not argue for its view of time. It asserts, and then shows the idea through transformation: a single-celled blob becoming a winged thing without losing its identity. The title's "No. IV" suggests it belongs to a numbered sequence, though the poem stands well enough alone. It leaves the reader with vertigo, but also with a surprisingly gentle picture of time as something alive and moving.