It happened in the second half of the chapter,
after we had given up all we had.
We realized that what had been trumpeted were
the flashy announcements of change, not change itself,
which for long had been readying its fist.
It threw us off course with respect to then and now.
We reacted like Vergil, who couldn’t decide
between the simple past and the present,
opting instead to veer between them at random –
mariners in the memory’s vast Aegean.
When the waters had settled we seemed to decide
there wouldn’t be any more sweeping revisions,
that we’d make a curriculum of retrieval,
learning to be happy with what was there
and deducing more from the contours of the seen.
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