Elegy for a Park

The labyrinth disappeared. The measured rows
of eucalyptuses have also vanished,
striped canopies of summer and the eternal
sleeplessness of the mirror, that repeats
every dumbshow of every human face,
every ephemeron. The stopped clock,
the matted tangle of the honeysuckle,
the glorieta with its silly statues,
the other side of evening, a bird’s trill,
the tower and the indolence of the fountain,
are all particulars of the past. The past?
If there is no beginning and no end,
if what there is in store for us is only
an infinite sum of white days and black nights,
we already are the past that we shall be.
We are time, the indivisible river,
we are Uxmal, and Carthage, and the broken
wall of the Romans, long since worn away,
and the lost park these lines commemorate.