John Anderson Poet Lyric

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All Light is Past Tense

Starlight is a ghost.
A memory still arriving.
A whisper from an ancient fire.
appearing fresh though already old.
The sky deceives with its brilliance.
A dazzling performance,
written in vanished ink.

Even our sun is a mirage—
its warmth already eight minutes gone
before it touches our skin.
We think, we live in the present,
yet we walk corridors of delay,
every door we open
revealing what has already passed.

Yet joy relishes the tick of particles.
Laughter distilled into drops of dew,
gathering the suspended onto the lips
to recall in memory.
To live “in the moment”
is to stand in the sea  of the past tense,
realizing time is a river
that never turns back, progressing
downstream, offering only recall,
and the ache of what slipped away.
There is no going back, no retracing, 
only recalling and regretting what we missed.

So I clutch your hand,
as if grasping a comet’s tail,
knowing the warmth I feel,
is already fleeting;
the light I see reflected in your face
departed long ago from somewhere else,
yet reaches my eyes now.
Knowing the light I see in your face
arrived from elsewhere a long time ago.

Yet I can still make the echoes bloom,
brighten them for their lateness.
We do not live in fresh moments,
but in arrivals that find us.
The delay itself is the gift.
Nothing touches us
until it first becomes memory,
unfolding without end
into the fleeting momentary now.

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