Pried loose from bright screens, the cousins
Romped in the sun, climbing and daring
Each other to do physically reckless things.
It was deep winter, or should have been,
But there wasn’t a fleck of old snow left.
Even the usual inversion had cleared.
It might as well have been spring, inversion
Of another sort. Didn’t matter to the cousins
Chasing each other over the bare lawns
As they’d chased each other with snowballs
Back in fall when it was colder. Three elders
On a park bench to soak up the sun
Were murmuring, however, worrying
What this meant for future weather, and I
Considered the usual moral here, the one
About living like children, in the present,
And not ruining life in pointless rumination.
But I wasn’t buying. I’d listened to the kids
Fret over their immediate futures, when
Would food arrive, the weekend end,
Parents come to take them home again?
They weren’t freer. Their horizons,
Like their frames, were only smaller. Enjoy
The present fully and you’ll pay a price
Tomorrow. Obsess over tomorrow,
And you’ll pay a price today. It seems
Telling that those with longer, moth-eaten
Scarves of memories and shorter prospects
Range their concerns over absurdly vast
Time spans, while those whose recollections
Fall off a cliff before two years ago, who live
With the distinct possibility of seven or eight
Decades still to go, fret over a future of days,
Months at most, most days. It seems telling,
But it isn’t. What’s telling is that when
This day became tonight, nothing changed
About how continually things keep changing.
And what’s it telling? We can’t change
Ourselves by moralizing; we can’t change
Our moralizing by willing ourselves. We
Change as we change, and like the days,
The sunny and the seasonal, we end and
We end, but there’s no end to our endings.
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