the cats are in the streets,
birds in the parks,
small bright pictures move
in the palms of bus riders,
but the window shows a structure
built thousands of years ago still
supporting a social imagination.
how long is a millenia anyway?
a century seems much shorter than
a decade ago, just three of me,
a millenia thirty,
and I can imagine thirty people;
but there is great difference between
being shoulder-to-shoulder
and stacking us head to tail
in time, a difference in
interactivity, simultaneous
collaboration, the depths of
the mirror of the facing mirror;
this is just how time works. banal,
but it always startles. perhaps
what shakes me is my own ache
for ruins, for a past whose bones
were not jumbled or buried
but rose up around us.