The
skin etches one molecule at a time
slowly
deeper into approaching night.
The
light moves across its dips and hollows,
those
tiny miniature craters, as if searching
for
meaning, but the meaning is only
time's
movement and how it reshapes us —
time,
that old rogue who waits for no-one
but
marches on with the tide, into a future
that
does not exist, as time is always
circular
and now. The skin, though, reveals
the
passage of time, regardless
of
music or roses or the faces of children
(your
children) looking back at you as they move,
forward
or back as they overtake and surpass you.
Then,
when you decide that it's merely
a
man-made construct, and you construct
evidence
in support of this — a new day dawns,
the
sun comes up, the world is round, and you know
again it's solid geography and physics, even if some
insist
time’s measured in a thin line on a cat’s back.
Written for a joust at dVerse in which we were to take a line from a poem by Brian OR Claudia and have it inspire a poem of our own. I am a bad person! Instead of choosing either team Brian or team Claudia, I was so intrigued by one particular line of each that I have used both, as my beginning and end. Either I will get disqualified or my entry will count towards both scores (which is much the same as neither).
