Pain won’t last, neither will beauty;
once everything is registered as atmosphere
only change is left: each waving branch
or fall of light upon water, each
scent or sound suggests as it fades
a world diminished against a myth of plenitude.
Tectonic shifts of orchestral sections
modulate tones a later minimalism will
catch or freeze from the end of a lost century;
amber doorways long encased in soot,
underwater gongs rusted, their particles
cast into colourless depth
beyond a continental shelf.