If Never to Be Seen Again

The rest of the poem is about

What you’d expect, but that first line

Of Vaughan’s, I saw Eternity

The other night, is its own poem,

Even now, centuries later.

To throw Eternity out there—

Explicitly visionary

But matter-of-fact assertion—

To witness the unseeable,

To see the whole of timelessness—

Seems grandly prophetic enough,

But then to add the off-handed

The other night, that’s wonderful.

As if all Eternity were

An acquaintance passed in the street—

Oh by the way, guess who I saw—

That’s beyond cheeky. Better still,

What makes the line its own whole poem,

Is that the phrase, the other night,

Also implies Eternity

Happens to inhabit random

Or at least ordinary, short

Units of time, lurking in them,

Not necessarily in all

Of them, but something you might see,

Just there, on any given night,

Included in the odd cycle,

Some old night that happens to have

Eternity in it, that once,

Spotted as you were passing by.