Time's a mountain stream
and I a young boy with his hand in the rushing water.
Near seven decades upstream I was born
and yet I see the same sunlight dazzling into my eyes
as that day at the beginning of the 1930s
when I dived into its flood from my mother's womb
and the same chill grasps my fingers
like blue ice, like life, like death.
I remove my hand to shake the drops clear,
diamonds in the sun.
But if I return it
is it into the same stream, or another one
entirely new?
Nothing returns the same as when it went.
Even to revisit an old homestead reveals
new planting thrusting up between the old flagstones
of the place that once it was.
The man in your arms today is not the same man,
and you are not the same
whom I kissed last night
the last time we were together.
Yet the woman I embraced
when you were just a child
and I never even knew your name
seems in my heart to be the you I have always known.
Tomorrow is not another day
for that suggests a sameness;
tomorrow is like today:
and unlike any other,
as you are, I am, we are,
and any other you, I and we
I may encounter in this journey through time.
Images flash upon the screen of our lives,
and they queue like quanta
in our vision's memory,
joining up but keeping their separation.
Flash! We meet.
Flash! We separate.
Flash! We meet again.
Flash! We are always together, always apart.
All this is fiction.
Are you here less now than then?
When I can reach out to touch you
not with my fingers only
but across the world to a seaside beach
where Irish waves break at your feet;
and I working in an attic viewing your tiny messages
upon my hand-held magic carpet?
Another time
we will walk together,
down a road, a moorland path, up a stair;
yet the sea will still be breaking,
my work still scrolling up the screen as I write,
the mountain stream still tumbling,
the sunlight still flashing,
as I dip my fingers, over and over,
into waters always the same,
always different,
always a fiction,
always the one eternal truth.
