Time is one of the quiet forces running through Shades. It is present in aging faces, changing relationships, lost moments, remembered places, and the awareness that experience cannot be held forever. R. Mark Beal does not treat time as an abstract idea alone. Instead, the poems show what time feels like when it moves through family life, memory, regret, and the ordinary world.
No Time makes this theme especially direct. The speaker looks at his children with both happiness and remorse. Their growth is a source of pride, but it is also evidence that earlier moments are gone. The poem captures a difficult truth: even joyful experiences become losses once they pass. A child’s words, expressions, and stages of life cannot be repeated exactly. What remains is memory, and memory is powerful precisely because it cannot return the past in full.
This tension between presence and remembrance appears throughout the collection. In A Moment Stolen, sensory details such as wind, shadows, grass, apples, squirrels, and hummingbirds create the feeling of a brief pause from ordinary demands. The poem does not depend on a dramatic event. Its power comes from the awareness that a moment is being noticed while it is happening. That awareness gives the scene a fragile quality, as though the speaker understands that the experience will soon exist only in memory.
The poem Age approaches time from another direction. An old man and a condemned building are placed in relation to one another, creating a meditation on aging, neglect, history, and disappearance. Both the man and the building carry stories, yet both are at risk of being forgotten. The comparison raises a larger question about what people choose to remember and what quietly fades from public attention.
Memory in Shades is therefore not presented as simple nostalgia. It can be comforting, but it can also be painful. Remembering may preserve love, childhood, place, or experience, yet it also confirms that those things belong to another moment. This gives many of the poems their emotional depth. The past is valuable because it mattered, but it can never be fully recovered.
The collection also suggests that awareness of time can change the way people experience the present. If moments cannot be stored indefinitely, then attention becomes important. To notice a quiet morning, a child growing, a loved one, a landscape, or even a difficult emotion is to acknowledge the temporary nature of life. The poems repeatedly encourage this kind of attention without turning it into a simple instruction.
That is what makes the theme of time feel so personal. It is not only about clocks, years, or aging. It is about the distance between what is happening now and what will soon become memory. Shades invites readers to recognize that distance while they are still living inside the present.
This perspective gives the book a quiet urgency. The poems do not insist that every second must become extraordinary. Instead, they suggest that ordinary time deserves recognition because it is already disappearing. Attention cannot prevent change, but it can deepen the way a moment is experienced before it becomes part of the past.