even though it is only early September & in the strip mall with the Target where I went to get a sympathy card for my sister-in-law whose mom died & wound up instead getting a six-pack of sympathy cards because lately my friends’ parents keep dying I noticed that the newly shuttered Bed Bath & Beyond next to the also vacated Buy Buy Baby had just reopened as a Halloween City, & it is always too soon for retail holidays, candy in bulk turning up in the seasonal aisle in late August right after school supplies are moved to clearance. Sacred time is indefinitely recoverable , indefinitely repeatable , wrote Eliade & I’m not sure what qualifies as sacred when I am profane, or, rather, historical, or just not-transcendent but I still refuse to be intimidated by time even when, at the head of the path to the beach at Eastern Point Light- house, there’s a dead gull lying on its side with a rock placed carefully over its head, as if to say, hey! if you want to experience the terrifying beauty of Dog Bar Breakwater— of the rough surf pounding Cape Ann while you walk on granite blocks with wide cracks between them stretching half a mile into the ocean— you must first step over a reminder of your own mortality & mortality isn’t the same as death, but a sort of awareness that time itself is sacred & epiphanous & as much as I plan I think maybe the one-day-at-a-time people are right: we never know what’s around the irreversible corner. My sister calls from her car on the way.