Midnight Extension Lecture

The unwinding of the world
Will be slow as well as swift,
Unnoticed and prophesied—

Both—will make a bumpy ride.
Times collapse in retrospect.
They lap at the shore betimes.

Somewhere, a generation
Will arrive for whom this world
Is all a pattern in stones,

Nothing but facts and fossils.
It won’t have happened to them,
But they may try to locate

Exactly when. No matter
What times they hypothesize,
There is no exactly when.

Waves are quanta in hindsight,
Only thumpingly choppy
Beneath any bow of now.

They dissipate. A shoreline,
A box with parallel slits,
The date the libraries burned,

These all provide sudden breaks,
Interesting to contemplate.
But the unwinding that ends,

Or appears to, past such points,
Was unwinding all the time
And continues to extend.