Hard Time

I imagine diamonds.  Perhaps it’s the facets,
the variety, the way we mythologize them
with a permanence outlasting our mortality.  
They are willed to following generations,
a reminder that dust once walked the earth.

Yet, what of that dust?  No footprints are left,
just memories of, storm-tossed events stored
in a splatter pattern.  Nothing can be retrieved but
reactions, observations and  guesses — educated,
perhaps, but no better than Ephesus’ reconstruction.

Time becomes jelly, a spineless entity looking for
one shape, yet assuming all variations.  Time becomes
a sentence, in which a finite number of words are
arranged in an infinite number of ways — a diamond
taking the clarity of a sunbeam and recreating it.