TIME’S VALENTINE

How and why time finally frees us
isn’t at first from itself of course
in its secret room at the heart of a flower
where beauty tortures and infects us

with its false theories of perfection
as if ideas were subject to gravity
or ugliness were a superfluous thing
when in spring or autumn sorrow

takes off or resumes its bird-like edges
trickling down or forced back up again
into odd bits and pieces of flown pleasure

into what seems terrifying we’re still trying
to conceal still uncertain how to penetrate
with open eyes the actual world.