Now

Yesterday...tomorrow.

Before...after.

Now.


Suddenly

spring has given way to summer.

In town legs and arms are bare,

offering mosquitoes and no see’ums

a banqueting table.

 

In the country night creeps up,

making way for thoughts.

How rare just to sit,

let oneself merge with the night,

stop thinking of anything but the now.

To stop thinking. And be aware of sounds,

of shades of darkness, of touch, of wind, of taste, of summer air.

 

Are we the only ones for whom there is a yesterday?

Who hope in a tomorrow?

Do the cicadas,

or the bats flitting around in the dusk,

think of yesterday

or of tomorrow?

 

The cicadas have given way to the crickets.

Closer on my left, more distant over on my right.

The taste of wine.

The quiet of the night is filled with sounds.

Crickets.

Singing, hoping to attract a mate.

A car passes in the distance. A dog is barking down the road.

 

How marvelous to be alone.

To be alone in a world that demands nothing

but a forgetting of one’s own identity.

The body vanishes.

It is all now.

Not yesterday and not tomorrow.

Only now

with the unrelenting strident voices of the crickets.

The embrace of shadowy trees.

The rift of darkening sky.

The man-made lights of the city

across the way.

A lethargy of not having to think back,

of not having to plan for tomorrow.

Being alone has to be learned.

Not feeling lonely

but being alone.

Without conversation. Without thoughts.

Where even movement ceases.

Other people’s lives and their demands

no longer seem to matter.

 

Back inside,

the hum of the computer

drowns out the night.

drowns out other sounds.

drowns out thought.

Or perhaps conciliates thought.

The empty screen, a blank piece of paper,

waits for me to give it life.

Demands I touch a key, put down a word.

But does it ultimately matter?

I am who I am

and that will not change

as I sit and let

memory take over, as I surrender

to the world around me and the now.

 

Second thoughts

Yet, is it all an illusion?

We can never, never be truly alone.

For there is no escaping from the  host of figures from the past,

or those from a now

that immediately becomes the past.

They are forever waiting

to be acknowledged. 

Is the present an illusion?