Falling time
poem
How the rain catches in the red and dying trees in fog and lonely days spent watching from your windows and the great grey towers spawned by the city, spires in grimy crowns – How we wind our several ways across the past moving blindly on its face full of crags and changeful knots, diving for pearls in alleyways, for warmth in the mist most visible at twilight under dirty lamps and blinking screens – O of all the world we have placed within our hands Autumn is the dying time, the oldest time, when we remember we are cold and the air itself grows old, cannot bear the light; Here ghosts cling to those who dream who are haunted by the sliver of a syllable which wrought itself in dust upon the floor: Here we pretend to age and loves we cannot now possess; Here we desire all the earth at noon and are by quiet shadows blessed. Here, in the world between this, ours, and the next, we let fall the shards of time, and pass them through our hands and know the pleasure of ghosts, which is to remember and forget.