Wintering

I say... assay essay.

I wonder whether all is well with past?

You see it safe in time's continuum
later-Einstein, earlier-Hawking way
that with a magic 'Tardis'-will we can
(for we are certainly bigger inside)
mystically connect and re-enact:
it drifts across our inner sky like these
grey clouds this mild day deal their monochrome,
but splashing color in a shock of scent.
Tom Eliot's convinced he was where went,
here or there, wrinkling or slim-slow sliding
in his beginning, till the bell tolls black.

But then biologists and quantum guys
come buzzing in to puzzle and to fuzz -
neurologists with corrolates to tweak
and particles that ain't there till we seek:
believe not in the middle of last week
nor be so sure of what's beyond our nose;
and Penrose says: "We live in a present
(but) resonant with echoes of the past."
Past reconstructed, qualia endowed
all in contempt of court, we mis-avowed
and let the guilty free, or worse, we sent
the innocent to Oz or gallows-tree.

Oh but you are now hoist by your own petard,
neurologists: since all is locked in chains
and nets of neurons rattling in our brains,
the present suffers as the past, you know.
Though we are great predictors of all things,
sometimes the fool to his projection clings
when patently he's wrong - and so it goes
a biased now can hardly straighten out.

(Does a present suffering affect
portions of the past that root personae;
or, vegetative as xylem/phloem,
does past send out new shoots to the present?)

Rest on the past as on unconsciousness -
but oh the monsters that swarm up from there,
the traumas and the heartache, the deserts
that if we do not reinterpret slay
any peace we can find ourselves today.

So I must say with Forrest Gump 'It's both'
mystical Tardis jump (the shock of scent
transporting re-enactment magical /
post-traumatic flashback  ripping through us)
and daily work to come to terms with time,
holding memory arms-length to chew on.

I'll not call today through these bare wires
and lingerers of sparse leaves, sky designs,
beneath the ashy grey of hurrying clouds
to any past nor future for support,
being quite content with ten degrees of dry,
the last week in November stretching out

this last late-autumn month where sparse leaves flap:
when present is the present I unwrap.

..............