And as usual, early summer seems already to hold, inside it, the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons we’ll soon enough lie down in, their diminished colors, the part no one comes for. I’m a man, now; I’ve seen plenty of summers, I shouldn’t be surprised—why am I?

As if everything hadn’t all along been designed—I include myself— to disappear eventually.

Meanwhile, how the wind sometimes makes the slenderest trees, still young, bend over

makes me think of knowledge conquering superstition, I can almost believe in that—until the trees, like fear, spring back. Then a sad sort of quiet, just after, as between two people who have finally realized they’ve stopped regretting the same things. It’s like they’ve never known each other. Yet even now, waking, they insist they’ve woken from a dream they share, forgetting all over again that every dream is private…

Whatever the reasons are for the dead under-branches of the trees that flourish here, that the dead persist is enough; for me, it’s enough.

The air stirs like history

Like the future

Like history