Pentimento

A new year is drawn but shows

days recently erased still beneath.  It’s repentance.

It has a long life. It bleeds

through the new work, day, life

and haunts the wet, freshly painted present.

 

Picasso’s 1901 Blue Period painting The Blue Room under infrared imaging revealed another portrait underneath the room scene. This pentimento is a bearded man in formal wear wearing a number of rings on his fingers. Did Pablo run out of money for a new canvas, or did he regret what he had painted?

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At Fourteen

At fourteen, I thought less about the future
and, unaware of Buddhism, lived in the moment.
Even a day was usually unplanned, spontaneous,
open to what the universe had planned for me.

If life is like a sonnet, the turn occurred when
the future became my focus and the present
rushed by out of control, and the past
became nostalgia, a read book fondly remembered.

At fourteen, I believed, without proof, in eternity.
The days unfolded unbidden and I was content
in thinking at some point I would be able to see

That fourteen-year-old’s future is my present,
slipping away from what I wanted it to be,
and even partially my past, now already spent.

Predictions

 

 

This time of predictions and resolutions.

Year’s end reflection back, and looking forward.

That river of time, downstream as distant

and unclear as upstream, and before me

passing before I knew it was here.

 

Droplet Moments

Water – shallow and muddy – like the present
moment. Then clear and deeper – the past,
but not so long ago. Further back,
clear and so deep, clear no longer
applies. Thick glass. Opaque memory. Droplet moments.

Image Credit: Photo by Skitterphoto. Public Domain via Pixabay

Time’s Arrow

is an arrow of increasing correlations and

one’s perception is movement from known past

to unknown future, but we find randomness

that cannot be undone on this quantum walk.

Entropy increases but all the possibilities exist.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets