It's difficult to think of

the past as the future of a second, or

of the future as the past of another.

It's difficult to imagine that these thoughts

and this perfect detail of my room's contents

in melted quartz vision and the fusion light through—my windows

freshly and warmly slanting from 1:12 pm on New Year's day

like amber dinner rolls in a wicker basket make butter run

—will be crumbling silk falling far below, dim filaments of recollection

as far-fetched as these first memories I have been

trying to uncover on waking,

all of them, which I can't,
before opening my blurs,
though I found some I hadn't considered

in years,

these now, this present presence, become

even more mystical and prone to tugging

on the stomach as strangeness and wistfulness

one day,

and after that they will be as prehistoric as anything,

will be utterly and then unutterably, abyssally

ancient to the frozen spiraling embraces of galaxies,

as bygone as a pattern can be,

yet this is as sure as anything can be.

Then even the most far-flung future

which can bear any relation to me

will experience this same precision of being

and follow.