the mirror of time and memory

Live in the house-and the house will stand. I will call up any century, Go into it and build myself a house… With shoulder blades like timber props I help up every day that made the past, With a surveyor’s chain I measure time And traveled through as if across the Urals. I only need my immortality For my blood to go on flowing from age to age. I would readily pay with my …

…hand as the boy follows, and the young mother is seen, choking back tears and then smiling, as if watching them. The old woman and the two children walk rapidly across a field in long shot; as the boy leaves the frame the young mother is seen standing in the middle of the field looking at her future self, perhaps in deliberate visualization of the Russian proverb: “Living life is not like crossing a field.”