Dragon Between Past and Future

Where the Wing Remembers Both Shores

The dragon does not choose a century.
It is the century choosing itself
through a body made of postponement and afterglow.
One wing trails the last unburned page of a library
that fell before paper learned its own name.
The other combs holographic rain
from towers that have not yet decided
whether they will stand or become rumor.
Between them the air keeps two calendars
and forgets which one is running.
Its scales are older than the word for scale.
They remember the heat of forges
that have not been lit,
and the cold of stars
that have already gone out
in some other telling.
Runes surface and sink like thoughts
a city has not earned the right to think.
Each pulse of light is both relic and prototype.
Below, the streets are wet with what has happened
and what is still negotiating its arrival.
Neon writes on water that was once a glacier’s patience
and will be, later, only a rumor of thirst.
Foundations rest on the quiet of forests
that still dream they are standing.
Billboards advertise tomorrows
already homesick for the dusk that has not come.
The creature’s eyes hold the only honest weather:
one the green of a memory
that does not yet know it is finished,
the other the blue of a question
that has not found the mouth that will ask it.
They look at us the way time looks at itself
when no one is watching
without pity, without verdict,
only the long courtesy of attention.
We live in the brief downdraft of its passing,
that strange, merciful interval
where the past is still unfinished with us
and the future has already begun
to miss what we have not yet lost.
Nothing is promised except the turning:
the slow, luminous hinge of a wing
that belongs to every hour at once
and to none of them completely.
The mist it leaves is neither ending nor beginning.
It is the place they briefly recognize each other
before the next uncertainty
opens its quiet, necessary hand.