Botany has systems, even if the lilies
of the field don't toil or spin or worry
about tomorrow. I too should
get organized, you say, it will save time.
Can you save time? Not for long, I think:
it does not keep, it passes.
Alphabetize your bookmarks, you say, and free
up time otherwise spent searching
through them all. However, living as I do
in the moment (looking up from my notepad,
I see a pale sun sinking slowly
behind a Baroque house A.D. 1698)-- to me
all time is free, available for sitting
by a fire now in the Chaloupe d'Or (the sky's a bed
of withered roses
against endless turquoise oceans) or for scrolling
inefficiently through all my seventy
bookmarked websites, looking for my bank
and gazing all I want at some future
evening sky, not apricot, not peach (the clock
opposite shows a gilded 10 past 5) not honeydew
melon either, but the colour
of a fruit not found
in any system of Linnaeus, never seen in photos,
not to be retained in your memory.
You have to be there.
They say death and taxes
are the only certainties. Indeed
I keep a system for my Value Added Tax, due
for payment every two months.
But as for death, I don't prepare. I let life vanish
slice by slice, like that apricot pie
in a golden crust (the sky echoes every brassy
flame unfolding in the fire-place) glass-coffined
on the counter.
The clouds are foaming beer now, and I down mine quickly
to get ready for that apricot, a taste no system can describe.