Winter Triangle

What is not there, and what is

There no longer, and what is

Not there yet, the triangle,

The sharp one, of not being,

The harbinger of nothing,

The sunk relief of the past

In memory, the present

Only imagination,

The future’s own intaglio

Carved by anticipation—

Those shadow tenses

The goddess personifies,

Her asterism conjures—

Not the past, but memory

Of what used to be the past—

Not the past becoming past,

But the re-imagining

Of memories, rearranged—

Not future, nonexistent

To begin with, the only

Nonexistence, drawing us

And everything to nothing,

But the future’s negation,

That yet of unknown 

Origin, not the nothing,

But sharp anticipation,

Sense’s keenest invention,

That the never is coming

Cloaked in the robes of the next,

That the next, the forever

Not yet, will rescue us yet,

Psychopomp, guide of the soul

To where nothing can arrive:

Of those three tenses,

The mind’s tenses of not-time,

Night time’s mirroring lenses,

Not there, not yet, no longer,

Is she really the brightest

Or the dimmest of the three? 

This body has been bemused

By stories of her consort

Who is sometimes a hunter,

Sometimes a spider mother

Dragging a galactic sac

Of spiderling stars,

Often a knight or storm god

Battling the dragon,

Sometimes the monster’s ally.

This body has not noticed

Often enough what is not

Present nor past nor future.

Triangle goddess of naught,

Of New Years on the old Nile,

Who was also a river

In the red bird of China,

Priestess, pillar, and blossom

In Polynesia, 

Wolves in Macedonia,

A duck in the Amazon,

A food thief in the Arctic,

So fat he fell through the ice,

And many other stories

About a few dots of light,

Too many stories to tell,

Stories that are no longer,

Stories that are not yet there,

There’s no need for this address.

The tenses of what is not

Are not what is not, not yet.

A glimpse of your stars

As we spin away from ours

Once a night is all we get.