Near The Pond

The brief curling wind

shakes a low branch, sweeping dust

beneath the willow.

Clichés

After several thousand years

Today progressed over baser times,
Yet love is a red, red rose,

Yet time is an hourglass.

These clichés—they still remain

Though the new is now.
How,
When the words of giants are carved on the wall,

Are we affixed undaunted to the words of juveniles?

Answer first:

Today, who has told your woman they loved her?

Today, who has told your man his brevity?

Discontinuity is an Emotional Shock

Now she is twenty-two.

Green eyes, white skin, blonde hair,

the springing youth.

A wonder with tight skin

and endeavors transcending yourself, 

passing you.

In the distant future is a serendipitous and unfortunate meeting:

Tourists again in the nave of some foreign cathedral you visited long before, 

where your pangs of loneliness were recorded as timeless echoes

—and people thought this empathy was God.

They resonate from the walls, 
and from her

gray eyes, gray skin, gray hair,

despite the thirty-years of thrills she recalls

with the help of her husband and children.

Discontinuity is an emotional shock.

Imagine your childhood house, 

a derelict skeleton ravaged by the elements, 

your family displaced or dead.