So, in Arcadia, that final scene,
Two groups of characters, two centuries,
Possess the stage at once
In temporal choreography between
And round each other. Quite oblivious,
Each mutually spectral pair confronts
The other's living flesh and blood, but sees
No trace
Of what plays out in double time for us,
Bristling perhaps for a faint twist in space.

Once in a while you may experience,
Or, well, imagine, some such incident,
Lingering in a room,
Or close location, charged with an intense
And living presence. You feel, arrested there,
If you could find the angle and assume
The line of sight, you'd witness them, their pent
And pending
Energy reel around you, and would stare,
Half wishing to retreat and half intending

To step into that dance and know their fate,
Those thirty ghosts for each of us alive.
Did not George Bernard Shaw
Say suffering does not accumulate,
The pain of one man is the sum of pain?
So pleasure. And there should be such a law.
For those encounters otherwise would drive
The heart
To breaking, too much pity to contain,
And, in the merging, tear the mind apart.

They tell us in about two billion years
Our galaxy and Andromeda will collide.
No latter-day Big Bang
Will blind the sky, or blast our atmosphere's
Protective bell jar. No, they will unite
In star-stretched emptiness and simply hang
Progressively together, as they slide
Around
Each other's maelstrom of conflating light,
For aeons and wherever they are bound.