Memory, time and change

A poem on change, influenced by the book, "How Philosophy can Change Your Life."

Memory's malleability and time's tempo
Play out life in complex 7/8 rhythm
Like free verse that shifts mood, mode and meaning
Midstream.
An unconscious under-rhythm, more than mere backbeat,
Is each individual's I Ching
A changing round of changes on the them of change.
Nature is a humanist, with contradictions writ large.

TEMPUS FUGIT, DIES IRAE

The sun set
An hour earlier today
Than yesterday.
The leaves turned redder,
Or browner in this dry year,
And my hike ended at late dusk.
The time that flees is mine
More than the thirst-unquenched oak’s.
But the wrath that could be mine
At passed days and lost opportunities —
As the change of time reminds me
Of the change of life —
Is not, on many days, is not.
An emotional detachment often plays
In the pensively introspective
Key of B minor.
Tempus fugit, dies irae.

THE OLD DISPENSATION

The old dispensation has come again;
The placement of time has been realigned to its origin.
What was saved or conserved these last months, really,
When divisions, boundaries, and placements of time
Are all arbitrary?

Not just with Prufrock’s measuring spoons
Do I lay out and measure my life.
The egg timer’s old-styled workings,
Its affected façade of accuracy,
And, above all, its smallness of scale,
Are all for me,
To measure out my time in thimblefuls
While pouring it away elsewhere in torrents.

And so, the daylight close comes one hour earlier,
Whether measured by clock hands shoved backward,
Digital watch buttons pushed and pushed and pushed,
Or atoms of cesium arbitrarily renumerated.

Nothing is saved;
Rather, the human mind is slaved,
Enslaved to the idea that an elemental dimension
Can somehow be tweaked and bent to our convenience
And put to work, like a six-month summer CD, to earn interest.

Nothing is saved;
Rather, the human mind is slaved,
Only to be jarred out of its Platonic cave
As the human body feels the one-hour shock
Every fall anew.