Nothing much happens in "Time," and that is exactly the point. A leaf falls from the top of Pagsanjan Gorge, lands on a river, and drifts away. Wicker takes this tiny event and turns it into a meditation on how time works: not as a clock or a calendar, but as a process that goes on whether anyone is watching or not. The final two lines make the claim explicit. "There is always another leaf," and the water is "always waiting." Individual lives, like individual leaves, are brief and replaceable, while time itself, like the river, simply continues.
The poem's structure mirrors the fall it describes. The first stanza is a slow, unhurried drop, and Wicker slows the language to match. "Leisurely it drifts its long, slow descent" is stretched out by its own sounds, with the long vowels and the run of unstressed syllables letting the line drift. Then comes a phrase that is quietly clever: the leaf is "playing with the perpendicular as it falls." The verb "playing" gives the leaf a kind of cheerful freedom, as though gravity were a game it could bend. The stanza closes on a paradox, "Aimless but directed." The leaf seems to wander, yet its destination was never in doubt. That small phrase carries the poem's whole view of existence: we feel free, but we are all falling the same way.
The second stanza breaks the mood. The leaf "strikes" the water, and the verb is abrupt after all that drifting. Its movement turns sharp, "swiftly into a graceful right-angle," the geometry of the word "right-angle" contrasting neatly with the earlier "perpendicular." The fall was vertical; now the leaf is horizontal, carried off sideways by the current. Then everything goes still. The leaf is "inert," and the water is "taciturn," a wonderful word choice, since it makes the river a silent, unreadable presence that gives nothing away. The water receives the leaf "as something that is sent, that makes no difference." This is the coldest moment in the poem. The leaf's whole graceful descent matters to no one, least of all to the thing that catches it. Yet the stanza ends by looking beyond that indifference: the leaf will go "beyond the river, / Out of the world of the river." There is a hint here of passing out of one realm entirely, which readers may take as a quiet image of death or of vanishing from view.
The third stanza steps back from the scene to the speaker, who admits to having watched it. "As I saw it I heard the anxious cry of a bird; / Then there was nothing." The bird's cry is the only emotional note in the poem, and the word "anxious" stands out against the "primitive calm" of the gorge. Perhaps the bird voices what the water refuses to feel. Then comes the flat finality of "nothing," a short line that closes the moment like a door.
Wicker uses no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines vary in length, stretching out for the long, leisurely drop and clipping short for "Dipping and swaying" or "Then there was nothing." This free movement suits the subject: a rhymed, metronomic poem about time would feel mechanical, whereas the loose rhythm here feels like drifting. The repetition of "taciturn water" in the second and final stanzas works as a refrain, bringing the poem back to its fixed point just as the river outlasts every leaf.
What makes "Time" worth reading is its restraint. It never says "life is short" or "death is certain"; it lets a leaf and a river say it for it. The poem also withholds comfort. The water is not cruel, only indifferent, and the last line offers continuity rather than consolation. Still, there is something calming in that, a sense of belonging to a very large pattern. The leaf falls beautifully, and the poem notices.