Stories From Yesterday

History is funny this way. Memory
changes from caterpillar to butterfly,
the way we have been taught
to imagine it, but history might
just as well reverse and from flight,
digress to crawl along the borders
of a leaf. Explosion, implosion —
there is no GPS to guide us
through life and it’s just too easy
to think the descending road
is ascending to the next crest.