. . . or, to put it another way,

variations
on a book of years
inscribed with the odds
on the Second Coming
of a lilac room
on a lilac day
and a curious mind
stunned into leaf
by the claims of process
and the opening of the bar
across the lilac road

and from the bar, the poem suggests
might come music, a song
I listened to once,
called “waiting for the end of the world”
that might have been
a song I heard

that might have been
suggested by the process of imagining
how the world turns
into a process of remembering
and being remembered