In Position

I want to tell you about time, how strangely
it behaves when you haven't got much of it left:
after say, or , when you'd think it wouldfind itself squeezed so hard that like melting
ice it would surely begin to shrink, each day
looking smaller and smaller - well, it's not so.The rules change, a single hour can grow huge
and quiet, full of reflections like an old river,
its slow-turning eddies and whirls showing youevery face of your life in a fluid design -
your children for instance, how you see them
deepened and changed, not merely by age, but bytime itself, its wide and luminous eye; and you
realise at last that your every gift to them - love,
your very life, should they need it - will notand cannot come back; it wasn't a gift at all
but a borrowing, a baton for them to pass on in
their turn. Look, there they are in thisshimmering distance, rushing through their kind
of time, moving faster than you yet not catching up.
You're alone. And slowly you begin to discernthe queer outline of what's to come: the bend in
the river beyond which, moving steadily, head up
(you hope), you will simply vanish from sight.