Without it we can’t live in the moment.
Without its slowly grown paler shadows,
Without its insistence, its distractions,
Without its being what no one else knows,
Now would be indecipherable scent,
Bodies statuary of fixed actions,
A path a path no walker ever crossed,
A mother’s love forever nascent,
Immediacy soon forever lost.
The dead past animates the dead present.
Old women walk among the dianthus
As a young gardener with shears deadheads.
All apply a modest calculus
Of then and now among the flowerbeds.
