Flowering Perennials

Being in time, I cannot watch time passing –
I see around me the revolving seasons in their
Coming and departure – fruit and flowerhead,
Foliage on the trees – see these but not as I do
Myself, aging and un-aging, mornings in a mirror,
Or the woman over there in the café, whom,
Half recognised, I’m sure I knew – each of us,
As all things, never seen exactly, but at a point
Between motion and fixity, in time and outside it.

So time is, and is not – coming in and out
Of being – refreshing and subduing in seasonal
Entry, exit and return – and in indifference
To its effects, discarding what it invigorates,
Casting life, the living, from its reach and
Nature into a state, a ground, beyond the budding,
The shrivelling, the firming and the softening
Of flesh in the oranges on the trees, the bloom
On the skin of the child, the woman, the man.

Yet this existence, beyond that of time, is surely
Experienced, prefigured, in the living person,
In the self-conception, self-awareness, that
Has no years, and remains unchanging,
As sufficient definition year-on-year – ever
An image, never the face in the mirror – as abstract
A picture as that of another, as of you, glimpsed
Here over croissant and coffee – despite time,
The end of any moment, the coming of the next.

What then of death, of the final loss of self
From the world of time, the certainty of there
Being one last moment of conjunction? Can it be
That the truth of the person was never lodged
In time, no matter the trappings of the body,
But was, is, and will still be, something other –
As the feeling of constant flowerhead is held,
Perpetual, unageing, companiable, within?
Then my dying, yours, would be our release.

Would it were so. Then this ever ripened, yet
Ever ripening inner – the kernel and florescence,
Both germ and burgeon, of self-certainty –
Sheltered, nestling out of reach of time within
Its live seed-coat, would wait on, welcome
Death for its free blossoming, its setting into air
In all its then unencumbered actuality. But
This is fantasy – it is not how the living die –
Finished with, lost to time, we join all that was.

And there is then nothing of the person left:
Time that brought all into being, takes the lot,
Cancels presence as it does the present, denies
Anything more to come – and the incidence,
Phenomenon, of agelessness – the constancy
Of season in the ever blossoming, ever fruitful self –
Is fanciful addition to our green materiality,
Which – hanging on a slender stem, and cut
Or drying out, drooping – delivers us to earth.

What other assertion, actuality, is there, can
There be? And it has one provident response –
Crossing the café floor to exit to the street,
To greet the other – once or never surely known –
Knowing that in greeting as we pass, we reach
And express that unchanging, ageless genesis –
The fecundity in each – rooted in the human,
And flowering in mutual recognition that we
Are briefly vital seeds, needing such brief light.

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