Present ~ Past ~ Future

Equinox & Eclipse

The Flammarion Engraving, 1888
From L'atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire
By Camille Flammarion (1842 - 1925)

Used by Donovan & Duo Dickinson

What is the Present?
Not to annoy the Future.
Not to crave the Past.

I am intrigued by the slippery sense of time in the following pair of near - sonnets by contemporary American poet Maggie Smith (b 1977). Taken together, the Past and the Future seem to advance and recede -- but no mention of the Present, so I wrote the above haiku to fill the gap.

Past
What is the past?

We needed a word for everything before.
See how my saying this is already there, and there
for good -- no fishing it out of that deep water,
the deepest there is. The past is a tide that drags out
but won't return to shore: even your question
has been carried off. Look, you can see it floating.
Anything heavier settles unseen like wreckage
for a silver ribbon of fish to slip through.
The past is not all distant. We can stand at its edge,
watching the waves do the backbreaking work
of pulling, pulling away. From the shore, the past
seems to go on forever, because it does. We say
it was a different time, but all times are different.
This one, for instance. And again, this one. (p 29)


Future
What is the future?

Everything that hasn’t happened yet, the future
is tomorrow and next year and when you’re old
but also in a minute or two, when I’m through
answering. The future is nothing I imagined
as a child: no jet packs, no conveyor-belt sidewalks,
no bell-jarred cities at the bottom of the sea.
The trick of the future is that it’s empty,
a cup before you pour the water. The future
is a waiting cup, and for all it knows, you’ll fill it
with milk instead. You’re thirsty. Every minute
carries you forward, conveys you, into a space
you fill. I mean the future will be full of you.
It’s one step beyond the step you’re taking now.
What you’ll say next until you say it. (p 80)


And this brief passage,
in keeping with the mystic properties of time:

Poem with a Line from "Bluets"

. . . For what should I save
my longing? Forget the afterlife, the aftertown:
there is no knowing what happens beyond this
sad animal, this sack of hair. Forget the golden future
beyond future. I want to see all of it here, all of it
through these eyes . . . " (p 87)

All three poems by Maggie Smith
found in her collection Good Bones [title poem]

Further connections
to Ann Patchett's novel, Tom Lake:

20: "You remember it that way because it makes a better story . . . That doesn't mean it's true."

"What's the story?"

"The past."

57: "He doesn't understand that it's the weight of the past that's pinned us there . . . ."

102: "At least we have the past."

116: "There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well . . . ."

300: "You think the thing that hurt you is going to hurt you forever but it doesn't."

My Harbinger Snowdrops

March First & March Second

"Camelot . . . The winter is forbidden till December
And exits MARCH THE SECOND on the dot."