A year before yesterday, a poem forecast
The need for the future to reach back
And orchestrate the past of a holiday
Just passed. Just passed again, that holiday
Showed up in another text, and the text
And the holiday alike echoed, closely, their pasts.
The future had done its job again, and another
Future would now be calling all on. Lined up,
The past events tugged into cycles, orbits,
Periods, and sequences by the future’s pull
Looked powerfully like repetition, like beads
On a string, all the countable things. But no,
Not really. The future may be a potent ghost,
And we may be haunted enough to converse
With it continuously, chattering and planning
In our classrooms, town halls, heads, and beds.
But it can only conduct a kind of tidal orchestra.
Each individual wave is strange in its own way.
The day after the holiday, clothes were churning
In the sturdy, circular machinery of washers
And dryers down at the laundromat. Campers
Soaked and muddy after the long weekend
And mindful of their future plans descended
To get their clothes clean by dividing the past
From its waste, renewing the sense that transformation
Was neither linear nor constant but could
Be trained, again and again, to begin again.
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