Lisa Gluskin Thought Experiment Dear, darling, now and now again we look, and often at the past: that time with the artichokes or just this morning, a spring hike, the two groundhogs and your childish, childhood thought: Everybody's getting it on. Well, it was the seventies. They were, and then they weren't...         Or we make plans. Imagine, shall we, a world where we could see the mundane present—me typing this line, you making coffee—         only from behind, catch something in its gait, its smell, and so make a memory. Or we could hope, hop forward: project the baby, the big quake, traffic jam and first hard frost. See: Yesterday you met me at the train. Next year is a leap year. All our present spent elsewhere, a mirror held over the shoulder and a smaller one, fogged, close to the eye. Things would still get done, somehow. Don't look so sad. How else would there be things to remember? We must have been there, being here. Enough. The sages say be present, through fracture and fade. Come here, stay with me, in this small room with the long white curtains. Here, where we say this one word: now. Roshambo It will end, all of it. It will end. Beyond you is finite, down only to the last, they say, who remembers your face, or (generous now) your name. Your words deflect the flesh, but rock in time covers paper, not the other way round. Scissors, though, are true, if only to confettii—which flares again as newsprint and Duraflame, the blades meanwhile lost to stone (that one we got right). Rock will end only in fire, our secret weapon—allowed once only ever, I mean ever. Make paper, the most fragile. Consign it to fire. Do it again and again— matchless, burning, gone. Lisa Gluskin lives near Lake Tahoe, where she makes her living as a writer and teacher. Her poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, Bellingham Review, and online at The Cortland Review and www.gumballpoetry.com. Last year, she won the James Duval Phelan Award for From Then, her manuscript in progress. Lately she's been writing poems about theoretical cosmology and junior high school.