68.

Nostalgia and utopia, past and future,

Absolve us of the present, but this impulse

To what was and will be is something

I at least cannot escape. It is

Another thing to falsify. We watch

Shadows on the wall, can try to fetch

Someone else’s reality — a lover’s,

An ancestor’s, an unknown great-grandchild’s

From an experience they hold. Time,

Distance, instinct, insight all help

The other to make some sense, but she

Has in all the tenses a world of her own

And I mine. This we is a fiction to live

In peace, the inscrutable angles of love.