And quite recently, I wrote another poem also
called "The Past."
This is the third one.
"You try to keep the present uppermost in your mind,
counting its blessings, which today
are many because, although you are not without hope
for the world, crazy as that seems to your gloomier friends
and often to yourself, yet your own hopes have shrunk.
Options are less abundant.
Ages ago, you enjoyed thinking of names for a daughter.
Later you still entertained at least as hypothesis
the notion of a not impossible love, requited passion,
or resolved modestly to learn some craft, various languages.
And all those sparks of future winked out behind you,
forgettable.
So the present, its blessings many today.
The fresh or ornate blossoms of the simplest trees
a sudden irregular pattern everywhere,
audacious white, flamingo pink in a haze of early warm.
But perversely, it's not what you crave.
You want the past.
Oh, not your own.
No reliving of anything, no, what
you hanker after is a compost, a forest floor thick, saturate,
fathoms deep, palimpsestuous.
Its surface a mosaic of infinitely fragile, lacy,
tenacious skeleton leaves.
When you put your ear to that odorous ground,
you can catch the unmusical, undefeated, belling note
as of a wounded stag escaped triumphant.
Of lives long gone."