These Things We Forget Poem by Barry Van Asten

Man, in the prose of life,
Where only memory can contain
The fragments and fibres of our ruin;
The importance of dates and their meaning.
Where the impressions of song gave us something;
Of horoscopes, of twilight, of dreaming,
Like the passing into that which we have known.

And I followed a pathway through the marsh
Describing things in the language of her birth:
Ravens, cow-parsley, buttercups...
Love's universal tongue never stops.
But feelings then were something secret
And only in memory do I find her now
Amongst the echoes of the past I used to know.

Yet, what passions still might fall
As we distance ourselves once more in speech?
Between the remembered and the forgotten,
Where only the necessary shall remain...
And this dark momentum of past destroyed,
Where life unresolved, and for all that,
Time accepted now will stay.

But what simplicity has begun
To lie only in memory's broken beams?
Am I to remain here, dismantled and dumb
With love always to mean more than it seems?
And what awful hour nears? Time's honour!
That in lighter moments and calmer days
Finds all things gone which once were ours.

And these things we forget,
Like the instances between us,
Governed by love's viewless ways
Where the noise of time bleats, bleary-eyed,
Devouring the chronicles and space
Between pleasanter moments and measures:
Sees itself, yet beyond can't pass.