Through a Glass Darkly

 . .  . . . . . . . Withered willows in the Fall
 . . . .  . . . .. . whither go thy leaves?

The layers of oversight have been
changed. Bare ruined choirs
stain the landscape dripping with rain

in late November. The 21st century limited
exists in tandem with the 16th and the 1st
when early Christians walked the earth,

were persecuted for forsaking Jupiter
and Roma and Nero the Living God.
The 23rd century is here too with its

impossible robotic perfection swelling
above the iron trees and glass domes
that cover still self-functioning cities :–

emotion sensors in every room to
quickly suss out layers of psychic stress
and oversight with an always watchful

awe-full eye toward change and maxi-fluidity
winking above the intersections of streets
and hallways: Is this not the Ides of March

asks Brutus and Shakespeare writes
this down in his panoptical play that
plays with time simultaneously perceived:

a clock in ancient Rome, chimney tops
above the Tiber (or is it really the Thames?)
and a pulpit for Antony’s flaming speech.

In 200 years will mourning doves and
deer searching together for acorns and seeds
seem an anachronism too silly to speak or think,

as silly as Newton’s planets still towing the same
old millennial line, elliptical routes gone haywire
the way of the dino and dodo? But they will

(of necessity) still be there by definition in the quantum
merging of past, present, and future all rolled into one jelly
evenly spread on slices of the time-space continuum

likened to a universal loaf of wonder bread
floating in the fifth dimension where you may have
parallel lives as a monk or a nun, a peasant or a czar.

Applications of entanglement have reached
pure states of nonlocality. Newton would have been shocked
off his pedestal and all the sages of antiquity

could not have predicted this spooky turn of events
if one can actually call invisible actions and non-matter current
phenomena. Fie on it! Fie! ’Tis a fardel not worthy to bear.

Science is back once again to magic – or perhaps it never
left it – all is sorcery, all alchemy, voodoo physics
in multi-universe bubble-dome micro and macro expansion :–

Infinity plus one.