In Memory

Every poem is a vote for the world beyond death,

But there may never be enough votes for success.

The rhyming of history yields the illusion

Of space in that plausible world where everything

Is distinctly different and perishes but most

Distinctions are so minuscule as to seem like

Perfect repetition, rime riche at very least.

Look at this tumbledown hillside of stones, basalt

Cubes all nearly the same, chilly now, long ago

Spilled in fractal-like waves of similarity

Over mesas of nonidentical sand grains

Compacted as monotonous piles of sandstone.

If there's a world out there, it's determined to try

Every infinitely divisible difference

In an endless ringing of trivial changes,

And the endlessness and the triviality

Create death birthed from the never-dead forever,

Create, among deaths, the transient consciousness

Of transience, memory forever mournful,

Forever joyful, forever incorrect. Life

Elaborates the transitoriness of life

And tats every deteriorating fable 

Of what was and therefore, would have to be, what is.

Nothing is like this, the ghost of contradiction.

A soul held two images of a narrative.

In one, a woman sits alone at a window

Looking out on deep woods, winter mountain twilight,

Taking in the evening, none of the home lights on.

In another, a light snake of discrete windows,

A passenger train in the night derails smoothly

From invisible trellises and vanishes

Into the unseen lake under the unseen ice.

A strip of celluloid, somewhere, broken into

Irreducible yes or no bits, held the truth

No soul could remember. There was no evening light,

No image of the doomed passengers in the night.