Déjà vu

​
The future lies on the other side of the neighboring
field or waits around the next bend—the one with no
center line—at an intersection fixed on a map.
 
What has already happened there wraps itself firmly
around our flesh like a rope hauling a climber up
the slippery scrabble of a nameless mountainside.
 
The future is a static landscape—not a spool of flickering
stills, their singularity revealed so fast we can't decipher
boundaries, but an infinity of the already been there and
 
done that, which we daily wander through, sometimes
stumbling into déjà vu, that familiar shiver raising the fur
on our arms and chilling the napes of our necks, as if
 
ghosts were drifting back into the rooms we call
now, wanting to tell us how it is or was or will be
since they think they have been there and know.




 
Just Now


Just now, over my right shoulder, I catch
a fleeting glimpse of a shadow as it slips
between my lamp and the shuttered window.
 
I think it might be the shadow of the sound
a passing car makes on the highway out front— 
transparent synesthesia—yet faintly blue
 
as if a single wave of tires on the blacktop were
washing through the wall into a ghostly form
whose half-life I cannot catch in my net.
 
Once I saw a wall of butterflies, their iridescent
wings pinned to cork, their names inscribed by
a careful hand in calligraphic ink, and their sky
 
confined to an airless box. And I wonder who
has just been in my study, bearing traces of
a shimmering sky that lies beyond our own.