A Theory of Everything

The simple perfectness of a half moon floats into the sky near midnight.

It puts fog lights and the incandescence of street lamps to shame.

I have been reading about retrocausality, which physicists say 
is the possibility that future outcomes might reach backward
to shape conditions in the present.

There is a dress with a mustard yellow print I found in a drawer,
which I once imagined wearing to an indeterminate event.

If I unfold it from its tissue wrapper, put it on now 
then go out to dinner, will it be like the me today 
reaching back to the self that desired this years ago?

We are always thinking of time as a progression of increments
moving in one direction.

Sometimes I cannot seem to tell what day it is, but the smell
of burned toast means Monday. 

Or I become stuck in a memory, which is a moment built up of 
strings of ticking parts. 

I clipped a stalk of jasmine from a bush, but it did not die
even if it could have.

In the future, I am already setting its flowers in a vase.

On the sill, some nights, the water pulls the moon down
its smooth glass throat.