Contributor’s Marginalia: Austin Allen on “Meant, in Time to Crack” by Stephen Kampa

The speaker of Stephen Kampa’s “Meant, in Time, to Crack” is seeking a revelation—not desperately but methodically, the way you’d test a combination lock:

I count the seconds, click by weighted click,
As though they were the tumblers to a safe
I meant, in time, to crack,

Knowing that if it took a hundred years
Of nimble-fingered tuning and retuning
And a musician’s ears

To learn the art—a lifetime spent in straining
To hear that moment when the moment catches—
It would be worth the training…

“Count[ing] the seconds” sounds tedious, but for the speaker it’s an exercise in devotion. His attitude toward time is the opposite of Macbeth’s in the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech; rather than cursing the “petty pace” of a meaningless existence, he finds weight and significance in each passing instant. He compares himself to a safe-cracker, determined to unlock some larger mystery, yet he hardly seems rushed. He’s willing to devote “a lifetime”—to what, exactly?

Layering metaphor on metaphor, he describes his safe-cracking in musical terms: “tuning and retuning.” But while Kampa himself is an accomplished musician, the figurative framework implies some other “art” that the speaker hopes to master. A good guess would be poetry: a verbal music built around sonic combinations; a meditative discipline that strives for moments of transcendence. In their crafty way, poets toy with sounds, images, and ideas until—with any luck—they achieve a breakthrough.

Kampa’s chosen form deftly mirrors that process, even as it showcases his own exceptional ear. Sustaining a single sentence across four tercets, each one rhymed or slant-rhymed on the first and third lines (as if seeking that perfect “click”), the poem reaches a grammatical stopping point only once the final rhyme slides into place. You might say it tinkers with numbers—an antique synonym for metered verse, and by extension for verse itself.

Or maybe this reading is too narrow. Maybe Kampa has in mind not poetry but the art of living, of making each second count. This would be a more spiritual kind of “training.” Field of Dreams fans will recall a line attributed to the novelist played by James Earl Jones: “There comes a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place and the universe opens itself up for a few seconds to show you what’s possible.” Kampa has spun this sweet hippie trope into something more nuanced and elusive.

The closing stanza sounds breathless with expectation, but the “darkness” behind the safe door, into which the speaker imagines reaching, gives us pause. So does the poem’s double-edged title. Is it the speaker’s dream of mastery that’s “meant, in time, to crack”?

As for “what waits inside” this metaphysical safe, Kampa leaves it to our imaginations. It could be whatever jackpot the artist’s heart desires: love, fame, wisdom, cold hard cash. It could even be some bliss awaiting us on the other side of death—“that most unlikely door.”  Then again, it could be nothing at all. The qualifications in the first stanza (“as though”; “I meant, in time”) cast a shade of doubt over the whole endeavor: the windfall moment might never arrive; those tallied and weighted seconds might never add up to anything. Meanwhile we have the mystery, the challenge, and the rewards of this superb short poem.