The History Games

It’s nothing to do with time, thinks Aristotle:
just like a geometric line
is not made up of a series of points,
time is not a series of nows. 

But let me ask you, Aristotle, things that I cannot.
My now is not yours; my now is now
and your now belonged to a world
that does not exist.
Your descendants are unknown
and you would not know them if you could.
Your name is a myth lost in the past
and the streets you walked are long gone.
If time is indivisible, then you were divided
and fell like invisible dominoes
to make a history that led to me. 

Some said that time was finite.
You argued with Zino in the long ago
and told him he was wrong to say that you
could not cross a room
or the arrow in the air
would never move at all.
And we still argue with you
and against you, taking sides. 

Aristotle, your now is gone
and now go with it.
Our history dogs us and you
are not a part of it. I am neither
Greek nor genius; I am not your child of child
nor the child of your enemies.
Our shores are too far apart,
and I believe in no divine intervention
to connect us across the yawning chasm
of millennia of darkness.
But the words you spoke on sunny Grecian streets
to students with their eager faces
still haunt my own mind today
though I heard those same lessons
from another man’s mouth. 

Aristotle, your now is gone
and I could not intrude upon it.
But now my now is here,
and your sandals haunt my footsteps.