The books are falling to pieces, the cards are on the table; with time I've darken'd my mind with words. Aquinas in the 1260s or ancient cities near the Amu Darya, swept over by layers of dust, now sunken, forgotten, a mere flickering of a single pulse in the vast life of an indifferent universe. What takes us from this present moment. The scratch on my arm, the line etched in a fallen stone now invisible, deep as it is in the bright, high grass.

Nothing will last; the spectacle I see behind the glass of my heart is without pomp or splendour.  

   
"Dark and light, certainly, death and life, and the title, which calls up both wakefulness and funeral starkness, intensifies the riddle..the youngest things in the image are also the oldest."     

--Robert Hass.