Grandfather Chimes

To the extent you can sense a difference
Between your past as it has been and your past
As it is now, every aspect of that change
Is a faerie flag’s revenant. If you could

Lift the changes like lace, like leaf skeletons
Out of the mulch of the composting fallen,
You could trace the architecture of sameness
That structures your awareness of what has changed.

The elaborately dendritic wayang
Of what remains of what has happened allows
You to narrate time and confuse it with change
Of any kind, when it is only kindly

Time, the stablest, most rhythmic aspect of change,
Change wearing the leafy-vined clockface of same.