Classic Poem

Oh, it's the same Time . But now
what you see is Time-passing.
(Not Time-arriving, the way
you saw it in Spring — trumpets
and bells in the grass.) Passing.

And if Time were a tree ...
And maybe it is, and maybe
its leaves are galaxies — though
those don't blow down . . . . But here , if
Time, say, were a Burr Oak,
what you see now by the hour,
and the day and the week would be all
the delicate seconds in a year
caught into bronze and falling
everywhere, withershins, in-
to untabulated memorials.

And that seems sad. And still,
it's the same Time, no matter.
You can write it as one year
going or another coming,
because no one knows really
whether the leaves blow
into the past or the future

or whether it be both ways
as with us it is who forecast
happier days and don't know
how to describe them — only
as being like some of those
way back there that we let go
or that let us go.