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.

Just How Many Ghosts Are in Your Head, Anyway?

Common as it is to know
A person from only words,
Or words and moving pictures,

Or any combination
Of virtual encounters,
Reciprocated or not,

It’s still fairly rare to feel
You knew someone a little,
Had some kind of acquaintance

From mute images alone.
Still, there are those photographs,
Those two-dimensional ghosts

That can haunt you as if you
Knew a personality,
A human being through them,

And if there’s been a human
Living through all the years since
Such photographs were taken

Who one day re-enters life
Through an obituary,
You may find yourself mourning.

Such Accurate Old Poets

All the dead writers who wrote
Of the brevity of life,
Their own and in general—

You could build a library
Just of lines on brevity.
While they were repetitious,

None of those writers were wrong,
Not one of them ever wrong,
An impressive track record

Of empirical success.
They said life was brief. It was.
They said they’d leave soon. They left.

Low on Reserves

Sometimes you’re not so much
Dying as failing, as
Dwindling, becoming less.

Sometimes dying quicker
Feels nearly appealing.
Get out with something left.

Sometimes it’s rough to care
About the many things,
How everyone will fare—

You’re almost out of here.
Let it go how it will.
Then you think of your kid

And care too much again.
Carry on while you can.