The past is dead. The present becomes the past
so quickly that it, too, is dead. Before I finish
saying the word, present, the present is past.
The present is gone forever, unimaginably fast.
Can I go
back to when this poem began? No.
Will science determine the speed the past
overtakes the present? The speed of light?
We enjoy nothing. We’re dead. I fear I’m right.
When a blown leaf mocks life, we also see
how experience itself—like fluttering poetry,
these very words—is not only gone,
but never was! Impossible to prove
there was real life or real love.
Once, for ten full seconds a floating flake of garlic skin
fooled me that it was a moth—
so is the whole past residing singularly in the tissues of my thoughts and sin.
The picture, the song, the play,
which we can repeat for the entire day
is, by its coherent length alone,
a good dream: God licked the static from the phone,
as the necklace of the years made progress,
a memory thrown into the barn with the rest of the horseplay.
Nothing lives or lived, no matter what we dream or say.
What the present must confront
is that it isn’t.