Equally

Almost every world is a gone world
By the time you’re scrutinizing it.
Nineteen-sixty-eight. Nineteen-ninety-

Six. Two-thousand-twenty-four. That’s three
Of them. There’s more. A reproduction
Of a painting, used for an album

Cover, itself reproduced in light
Glowing out of electric digits,
Shows the open doors of a farmhouse

Onto a luscious Finnish summer
Of sun all day and abundant green,
Sometime in the nineteenth century,

And you scrutinize it, and you sense
The northern summer air, the wood smells
Of an old farmhouse you know is not

This one painted in oils some decades
Before you were born, but one of yours,
Only equally from a gone world.