11 PM, December 31, 2020

It’s the way things go on, virus

or no virus; it is only reasonable to think

the world tomorrow will be something like

that of today and yesterday,

A world stitched together

by gravity and van der Waal’s forces.

There will be places filling space

and there will be time.

Places we can name: like Johnstown

or Johannesburg, like San Diego or Ammon

or Hiroshima, places we can go to

and places we can be.

There will be time, parsed into aliquots

of Bergsonian duration, warmth and cold

and twenty-four hour cycles of light

for work and darkness for love.

Time like wire drawn from ductile steel,

through the sharp aperture of today

from the infinite store of tomorrows

becomes the yesterdays of memory.

Or should I not be here to see with eyes

of Kantian mind, will there be springing

kine and birds and green meadow flowers;

will every sun gutter and die?

Or if our sustainer God is finally poured out,

exhausted and dying or already dead

how will there be anything at all,

how something instead of nothing?

Self Portrait