This morning at the summer solstice, countdown toward winter already begun,
I remember when you rowed the dinghy downstream on the Wye to plant a stake
in the reeds where we saw the sun rise.  Last December’s marker stood a hand’s
breadth or two upstream where the muskrats nest and I sketched it from the dock.

Now I ask myself if we were such keen partakers, back then in our prime, of facts,
observation, wonder, beauty for its own sake, that we forgot all about tyrant time?
Or were we precocious prophets, refusing to let a single quarter segment of the year
— for we noted equinoctial moments, both spring and fall – slip through our fingers?