...time in this poem? Basically i'm just really struggling to get started and I would really appreciate a few comments or analytical points, thanks

Learning to Drive:

Today I find it hard to keep time in mind
end up taking a taxi at the last moment
to stop-start in traffic jams and slalom
round the corners of grand squares as we attempt to catch up with the day.
And this rhythm's really no different from
the rest of time that slows and accelerates
in the archives of memory - like film constantly
caught tight or slipping in the reels - while
for the future it shows me the prospects I want
to have right now - others i'd like to derail
on a side track that will arrive only delayed.

One more surge of the engine,
given its head for the moment in these London streets,
and we're dodging into familiar short cuts.
Places that really are from the back archives of time here.
I learned to drive in these streets, with an instructor
who could spot irritating respectability block away:
"it's a civil servant - you can put your foot down -
he's got time to jump" before we returned to the less glamorous
business of reversing round corners. As i opened the window
to watch the slow kerb slip treacherously close, a scent
of cool pine branches would enter, soothing us both.
Time operated on a different level here.

Here by an opened window on a chair softened by towels
pensioners would wait all summer for a sparrow to appear
on a ledge laid with scanty crumbs like thin possessions
spread for sale in a street market. In the municipal gardens
children drank in heat from the perpetual lawns and revelled
in the living smell of fresh cut grass. Traffic was
the ice-cream van, playing foolishly lugubrious tunes
that stuck in the mind, while clouds in cumulous scoops of vanilla
strayed among towers that stayed the afternoon.
I see now the windows and the lawns pass in perfect slow motion.
My watch shows we crossed these streets in a minute flat. Even
the meter han't changed. But a cascade of summers has flowed in.