The River of Now

The Buddha tells us
that only in the present
can we escape the tyranny
of desire. The temporal exigencies.
But we need time and memory
to locate both where
and who we are.
The flower bathed
in a shaft of sunlight,
the sweetness of the deepening kiss,
are all fixed in the temporal mind.
Eliot said that the past and future
point to one end – which is always present.
But since Niels Bohr and Einstein,
there is another game afoot.
Everything is probability.
We can’t say how fast we’re going
and where we are at the same time.

A new version of the famous
double-slit experiment showed that the future location
of a helium atom determines its past location.
Everything is a reverberation of the future.
We dangle our hand in a moving stream
and think, ah, there.
But the river has already moved on
and taken who and when we were with it.
If the future creates the past,
we never even know
when we are.
Everything
is the future
moving backwards.
I was always going to love you
even before you were born.