The Present Moment
Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 3:13 pm
If we could capture our fleeting recollections
of the time before the summer, we would surely do so,
but we can hardly recall the summer, let alone
the time before, when we were just children.
Our entire lives have played them selves out, this way,
behind dark glass, and we are outsiders in events
that have little or no significance at all.
What it was plausible to remember is lost
in other energies, just as we are all nowhere
to be found. To each other, we say, ‘be near,’
but the suspicions of which we are made, linger
and we know, childhood and first love
will never be lived again, not in poems
or fairytale, not in autobiography or film
will we ever touch the hand that reached for comfort.
Too cruel, almost, to think that love’s affections
could be misplaced or forgotten
in the space of a year, decade or a lifetime. Too sad
to dream of those children who were never born.
We live by these laws of forgetting
as surely as we live by the laws of heaven.
Try as we might, to resurrect the dead,
we can hardly restore the bare bones
of our own history. Joy, despair, illusions,
all of it irrelevant, all of it passing, un-named,
as though, it’s passing meant nothing,
and then, once more, recollections are denied.
We move from one node of memory to the next
searching for answers, as we pass, faintly past
the bolted doors of self and self-preservation.
All too soon, we ready ourselves for the next
sombre ringing of the clock, the next cheerless goodbye.
Come to me now, in the bleak mid-winter,
if you can still hear me. Come to me now, as if,
you were my only love. Stay with me now. No, closer.
No, closer still, as though it would last forever.
of the time before the summer, we would surely do so,
but we can hardly recall the summer, let alone
the time before, when we were just children.
Our entire lives have played them selves out, this way,
behind dark glass, and we are outsiders in events
that have little or no significance at all.
What it was plausible to remember is lost
in other energies, just as we are all nowhere
to be found. To each other, we say, ‘be near,’
but the suspicions of which we are made, linger
and we know, childhood and first love
will never be lived again, not in poems
or fairytale, not in autobiography or film
will we ever touch the hand that reached for comfort.
Too cruel, almost, to think that love’s affections
could be misplaced or forgotten
in the space of a year, decade or a lifetime. Too sad
to dream of those children who were never born.
We live by these laws of forgetting
as surely as we live by the laws of heaven.
Try as we might, to resurrect the dead,
we can hardly restore the bare bones
of our own history. Joy, despair, illusions,
all of it irrelevant, all of it passing, un-named,
as though, it’s passing meant nothing,
and then, once more, recollections are denied.
We move from one node of memory to the next
searching for answers, as we pass, faintly past
the bolted doors of self and self-preservation.
All too soon, we ready ourselves for the next
sombre ringing of the clock, the next cheerless goodbye.
Come to me now, in the bleak mid-winter,
if you can still hear me. Come to me now, as if,
you were my only love. Stay with me now. No, closer.
No, closer still, as though it would last forever.