How odd that entropy is time’s measure—
that through the dissolution of the world
we know, time’s arrow swiftly flies its course—
irrevocable and unrelenting.
Yet isn’t there a certain artfulness
to time’s advance? The ineluctable,
the crease of wrinkle in the lover’s cheek,
a river’s tireless sculpting of its banks?
In all the scything, striving, dying, all
the loss, the grief, the thievery of years,
there is design of a kind—a subtle mind—
deaf to prayers though always true to mission.
Though time has swept us, love, in its advance,
there’s music there, I think, by which to dance.