Outlasting Change

Itinerant

Asked why the past so occupied his mind,Seamus Mahon would offer the one reply:“Not enough is happening in the present.”A man without a home, he seemed to me,

Though now, I hear, he doesn’t go anywhere.Always the avid traveler and the lover,He rarely paid attention to the linesThat separate one household from another

And keep apart the souls we might emboldenFrom those we would do well to leave alone.Not that he was foul or ill-intentioned.Rather that he failed to comprehend

The havoc and the hurt he often wrought,Being more the constant dreamer than the scoundrel.What does he dream of now, I have to ask,The past being gone, the present void of wonder?

The Next New Day

Is there not a hastening of sortsthat happens after forty, fifty, sixty?The train is hurtling forward. All its partsare functioning as they should but moving faster,as are the weeks, their old complexityreduced, or so it seems, to days and nightsoccurring without pause. Each new disasterarising in the world gives weight and height to that particular day, and each new joyimprints itself as ever in the heart.What’s altered is the interval betweenevents that once seemed comfortably apart.How short it grows. How soon the next new day.

Impermanence

No one wants to hearThe blue jays’ crass racket

But on it goes, outlastingThe longest human life.

How to reconcile that noisePersisting down the decades

With what I know of change?Early-morning light

Is brightening the poolsOf water on the deck

And all I might believeOr once believed is subject

To unrelenting change.So let me celebrate

For all its testinessThat harsh continuing cry.