The Enthusiast

for Douglas Barbour (1940-2021)

You are not here. There is no reproving
the dark hand that has touched you
and no need to prove your strange new
cellular shift. There are changes because
we are changes, so there is no need for the odd
equivalencies, that today it rains and yesterday
it did not; that the world is constantly rift
by its own gravity because it spins on
a wobbling axis; that one day, not long ago,
there was no such thing as Mozart’s Requiem,
and then there was. Or, to work backwards,
you are not, but you were.