In those times the unexpected held sway.
No one studied the news. Existence
was in the present and only
romantically in the past and future.
From the seasons I knew what to expect
but not from history. So do I remember
spring's first signals in the return
of redwings, in the winnowing flight
of snipe, later the bobolink's
hovering song and the blowing iris where
swamp and meadow meet. Last season, last year,
that was the past in practical affairs.
But romantically I heard the beat
of ancient drums and saw the haze
of remote campfires. But unlike
the buds of May, the maturation
of children was unexpected and the
nubile daughters of neighbors came upon
me like strangers through the arch of dawn,
like the late summer ejaculation
of jewelweed seeds after slow maturation
under cool arbors of wild cucumber vines
in the deep elm swamps. I was unprepared
for all the twittering exhuberance
and legs so warm that summer's lightest
cotton prints couldn't cool them but must
demand skirt-raising, form-defining breezes.

And so also it was with the world.
So even as I listened to
dictators' rantings, the capture of remote
islands, I could discern no underlying
pattern of the future, only the present's
hidden springs of capsules peppering
my face. In that way Pearl Harbor
and draft notices burst upon me,
and with them went the poignant life
of nature's rythms, the old country —
small town thrills like those warm legs
packed into blocky 30's cars, the quiet
of narrow, lightly-traveled roads
(even these now recognized as the very roots
of an unwelcome future), a time with all
its sounds and smells vanished forever.
Indeed the roots bore fruit in the postwar
world of wheel-singing freeways, the blaring
horns of commerce and plastic-scented
stores, cutting to ribbons the fields and hills
and soiling the waters of my childhood.
This was the price I had to pay
for the power to know the future ever so little —
to learn that entropy held sway.