"Youth"
"My sister and I at two ends of the sofa reading,
I suppose English novels.
The television on, various school books open,
or places marked with sheets of lined paper.
Euclid, Pythagoras, as though we had
looked into the origin of thought and preferred novels.
[LAUGHTER]
Sad sounds of our growing up, twilight of cellos,
a trace of a flute, the piccolo.
And it seemed at the time almost impossible to conceive
of any of it as evolving or mal-evolved.
Sad sounds, anecdotes that were really Still Lifes.
The pages of the novel turning, the two dogs snoring quietly.
From the kitchen, sounds of our mother,
smell of Rosemary of lamb roasting.
A world in process of shifting, of being made or dissolved,
and yet we didn't live that way.
All of us live our lives as the simultaneous ritualized
enactment of a great principle, something
felt, but not understood.
And the remarks we made were like lines
in a play spoken with conviction, but not from choice
A principle, a terrifying familial will that
implied opposition to change, to variation.
A refusal even to ask questions.
Now that world begins to shift and eddy around us, only now
when it no longer exists.
It has become the present unending and without form."