The day after the funeral

I know this is your wish, but there is no medicine
to stop time. There is no defence against age creeping
along the vines of experience. And experience is
never enough, never enough dike to defend against
the flood of time. I clutch days and memories,
spread the dying leaves of events onto the path
in front of me. I walk across the shells of bodies
which a few, or many years ago, danced with life.

Do we always have to be late arrivals to the party,
or suffer from the memory loss of thinking that
one moment and then the next was so very important?
Life is the past tense, the settling way, the path
we experience as having been walked a day,
or twenty years ago. Life is that maple leaf in October
settling into all the other fallen leaves on
a rural trail. Life is a book marker between infinite plots.