In certain moments we can sit and look
at floes that float down rivers,
clouds that ride in great flotillas
across the sky,
lives that roll
down the slope of time,
accelerating in the weight
of all they have accumulated,
bringing the past with them,
slowly melting in the heat
of the present

What is actively alive here?
And what has settled
for the insulation of memories,
referencing states of being
which themselves, perhaps,
were all caught up
in the glamour and swirl
of confections of stories?

Is this a picture
of how we all go,
or is each of us, in our true selves,
something else entirely,
bemused by the illusion of us
in which we sometimes see ourselves
and which it sometimes seems that others see?

©Wendy Mulhern
August 13, 2015