To feel yourself wake into change, as if your change
Were immense and figured into the heavens' longing.
And yet, all you want is to rise out of the shade
Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night
When the moon shines and the earth itself
Is covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep.
II
Where is the experience that meant so much,
That carried such weight? Where is it now
If not lodged in memory, in the air of memory,
In the place that is not a place, but where
The mortal beauty of the world is stored.
Oh yes, we are busy under the moon's gaze,
Its mouth giving back a silent 0 of surprise
Each time we try to explain how it was,
How fleeting, breakable, expensive it was.
Weare always about to take off into a future
Unencumbered, as if we could leave ourselves behind,
But of course we never do. Who can face the future,
Especially now, as a nobody with no past
To fall back on, nothing to prove one is
Like everyone else, with baby pictures
And pictures of Mom and Dad in their old-fashioned
Swimsuits on a beach somewhere in the Maritimes.
Weare at work on the past to make the future
More bearable. Ah, the potential past, how it swells,
How it crowds the days before us with feelings
And postures we had dismissed until now.
