Old Friend

For J. A.

Od friend, when we talk time loops and it spools 
and it pools, it cools and it warms, takes heat,
bubbles to steam of dreams much as we do,
leading back to see who we might have been

and who we are, knowing that we are but
the tools of time, time's fools that jests with us
in all that we do and in all that we
might pretend to have done, mirror dissolves

and we find a succession of faces
that might be ours, have been ours, or perhaps
of strangers whom we hardly dared to know -
are we rafts who ride swirl of time's river?

who knows and who cares, the pleasure is in
the company that's constant as we change