These measly fractions of
of our lives—
the crumbs
we horde, shivering
and the theoretical
models of its atoms
which we first have
to sketch,
then believe-in, then
remember—
they're such a small
part of it;
it's like we're all
staring—long and hard
at the world's
most precise
and sincere
and dazzlingly
beautiful mural,
one-eyed,
through a skinny
corroded length of pipe,
to witness one simple,
unsentimental
tile at a time.
This big picture—
if we could see it
mounted there,
against the far wall
made of pure
white lightspeed—is titled:
The Future is Only the Past Remembered
and the docent's little inscription
beside it
probably reads
something like:
The artist's intention here—was never
to win the war.
It was always, only, and ever
to stop it.
