4 Shifting Tenses

Four Piece Plastic Tetrahedron Puzzle

4. Shifting Tenses

On my last night there was a party in the Waikiki Beach apartment of a friend for aloha. My closest friends—a handful—wished me good luck and bid farewell in their own best ways.

Elizabeth gave me a tetrahedron puzzle— a pyramid—to carry "for her" around the world. (The tetrahedron is the shape of the carbon molecule—sometimes called “the building block of the universe”.)

To her (and MY) great surprise, I solved the puzzle in seconds.

Along with the gift puzzle was this poem:

shifting tenses

by ee (Elizabeth English) 18 December 1972

i am just so overwhelmed
by the past tense of you
that all my being flips into the future
with the speed of light
i am jarred by the contrast

for
i
am
only
now

...