It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes

That all things have their center in their dying,

That each is discrete and diaphanous and

Has pointed its prow away from the sand for the next trillion years.

After that, we may be friends,

Recognizing in each other the precedents that make us truly social.

Do you hear the wind? It’s not dying,

It’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust.

The past in each of us, until so much memory becomes an institution,

Through sheer weight, the persistence of it, no,

Not the persistence, that makes it seem a deliberate act

Of duration, much too deliberate for this ingenuous being

Like an era that refuses to come to an end or be born again.

We need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight

That inundates our remarks before we can make them

Taking away a little bit of us each time

To be deposited elsewhere

In the place of our involvement

With the core that brought excessive flowering this year

Of enormous sunsets and big breezes

That left you feeling too simple

Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one

Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one

Built to prevent you from being towed to shore.