Now see: they've found a man in a glacier,
two thousand years old, or three,
with everything intact: shoes, teeth, and arrows,
closed eyes, fur hat, the charm he wore to protect him
from death by snow. They think he must have been
a messenger, done in by bad weather,
and still fresh as a mastodon. Then there's
the box of slides in the cellar
my brother found, the kind we used to
tape between glass. As it turns out
the wrong thing for mildew.
Some cleaning, scraping away those little
flowers of crystallizing earth, adn then
a wand of light, and here's my father,
alive or else preserved, younger than all
of us now, dark-haired and skinny,
in baggy trousers, woollen legs tucked into
those lace-up boots of our ancestors,
by a lake, feeding a picnic fire
in the cleaue-tinged air of either
a northern summer or else a film
of aging gelatin spread thinly
with fading colours,
the reds pushing towards pink, the greens greying,
but there. There still. This was all we got,
this echoe, this freeze-framed
simulacrum or slight imprint,
in answer for everlastingness,
the first time we discovered
we could not stop, or live backwards;
when we opened
our eyes, found we were rocked
with neither love nor malice in the ruthless
icy arms of Chemistry and Physics, our
bad godmothers. It was they
who were present at our birth, who laid
the curse on us: You will not sleep forever.
