We So Firmly Believed

We so firmly believed in the linkage of life,
but now I’ve looked back–and it is astonishing
to what a degree you, my youth,
seem in tints not mine, in traits not real.

If one probes it, it’s rather like a wave’s haze
between me and you, between shallow and sinking,
or else I see telegraph poles and you from the back
as right into the sunset you ride your half-racer.

You’ve long ceased to be I. You’re an outline–the hero
of any first chapter; yet how long we believed
that there was no break in the way from the damp dell
to the alpine heath.

“The poem,” writes Brian Boyd in Stalking Nabokov, “is a deeply moving reflection on the gaps in memory, the gulfs in time within the self, the sense that as you look back at yourself you realize that despite the illusion of continuous identity, you may no longer feel a live connection with your younger selves.”