The Lamp of Revision

--Joshua Edwards

Later, when those mysterious

words would again possess you,

desire and ideas from yesterday

could cause familiar people

to seem imaginary. The zodiac

was useless, hours were ancient,

memory was just memory.

You began with the thought

to improve what you had made,

but then maybe it would be

better abandoned altogether,

to try and make something new.

So here you are, beginning

again what you'd once believed

was finished. Present pleasures

anchored in the past, you walk

across a familiar landscape

and arrive at a new mountain,

as if there were such a thing.

Never sad, never powerless,

you are a climber whose form

of joy would go on and ever

upward to murmur strange

opinions into a thinning sky.