In the school hall they are stacking the chairs.
Smell of chalk-dust and wood polish comes creeping
Like the distillation of a past, although I wonder
How many generations, now, will smell those scents,
In this age of concrete and plastic?
No doubt they use some other surface, now,
Than the blackboards I used to love to clean.
And having done, would bang the erasers together -
Whoof -
To show that when you erase something, there is always something left,
Even chalk.
Nothing is ever utterly destroyed.
The sun burns whitely in the roof of the sky,
A bright silver penny.
The fog reveals, hides, reveals, hides,
As I do time after time.
Looming towards me, a cherry tree on the path,
Its flowers opening, all colours bleached.
It is a sinister cherry-tree,
Created from my hate of you.
In that picture you were holding me up to touch the blossoms.
Looking at that photograph, could anyone
Discern the future from the past?
The future is not fixed, but mutable.
If I had spoken, if I had spoken,
The words like a lullaby after all this time.
O if only, O if only
(And I do not have the bandages
That will heal these speaking wounds)
The fog like a balm upon me
Transforms those shapes;
For after all I cannot bear
To think I had power.
Neither a wave nor a particle until observed.
So looking back on it,
I transform and obviate my past.
Occlusion of clouds, I read,
Only until this moment was it potential;
Would it become fast
With stares uncaring
For the particle (or wave) within?
The choices we make, the actions we take, affect the events to come.
If I could be a particle (or a wave)
I would dive back into the crest of the past
And swim,
And stop myself tugging on your beard
(Which you wore like a badge of manhood
in that brief season)
Each droplet of fog a bubble of the past.
I could touch each one
And find my way back to you,
Following the tachyons
(wave, particle, wave, particle)
And perhaps that would make a difference-
A perfect swirl of mist descends,
Which I, the driver, cannot dare to sully.
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