ANOSOGNOSIA
Why don’t they tell us (but would we want to know?)
that time’s inflationary,
its power of purchase doesn’t grow,
it shrinks:
at first imperceptibly,
then accelerating steadily,
till days are flicking by like phone poles from a wailing train
or stroboscopic fragments of your
parents’ nervous smiles
as you keep hurtling
round and round
on some
vertiginous
vehicle
of amusement.
“Why, I remember, when I was your age, a morning would last a day,
a summer a year, a decade nearly a lifetime.
If I’d held my hands apart to show my life line up till then, look:
this is how long it would have been…
So do you think where I am now is seven times as far?
Ha! twice, three times at most.
And the last third’s
the shortest.”
But who can understand such baleful reckoning? and besides,
a proportionate paling of our sense and recollection
must be factored in too,
diminishing awareness of our ills
even as they increase.
Lord Russell had a killjoy uncle who informed him as a child,
at the close of an especially glorious day,
“You’ll never know another day like this one.”
And little Russell cried and cried, and then forgot.
Even “seize the rosebuds”
is a futile admonition
that rings true only
for the long since anosmic.
And isn’t there (confess it)
some diffraction too
in those wistful flashbacks to your day, when that buck stretched so much farther than it does today?
Which buck?
There’s no fixed scale
of barter or utility.
The goods, they differed too then,
and not just in their quality,
but in your own ability
to savor it.
Generation gap.
Communication gap.
It’s Zeno’s paradox:
You can’t get there from here.
“Tempora mutantur. Et nos?”
Why don’t they tell us (but would we want to know)?
CODA (Hommage to Paul MacLean)
The one frail consolation
Once you’re just an old iguana
Is you can’t recall what’s bothering you
Even if you wanna
Istvan Hesslein (c. 1993)