When the innkeeper of the inn

where we were staying in the Outer Hebrides

said we had bags of time to catch the ferry,

which we would reach by traversing the causeway

between this island and the one to the north,

I started wondering what a bag of time

might look like and how much one could hold.

Apparently, more than enough time for me

to wonder about such things,

I could hear someone yelling from the back of the room.

Then the ferry arrived, silent across the water,

at the Lochmaddy Ferry Terminal,

but I was still thinking about the bags of time

as I inched the car clanging onto the slipway

then down into the hold for the vehicles.

Yet it wasn’t until I was at the railing

of the upper deck with a view of the harbour

that I was able to conclude that any bag full of time

would probably be the same colour as the pale

blue hull of the lone sailboat anchored in the harbour.

And then we were in motion, drawing back

from the pier and turning toward the sea

as ferries had done for many bags of time,

I gathered from talking to an old deckhand,

who was decked out in a neon yellow safety vest,

and usually on schedule, he added,

unless the weather has something to say about it.

Billy Collins is a former poet laureate of the United States, whose most recent collection is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Picador )