The Chestnut Received

What needed to move, a few leaves among the chestnut trees, moved.
–Marcel Proust

Charles Garçon was confounded by the sun.
In summer this gnomon-like man
would sit among the chestnut trees
and watch time move by attending to
the shadows as they crossed lines
which were both too imaginary and
too real to be precise. In winter he
would laugh about those ‘summer fashions’ he
no longer believed in: to go to bed
before the sun had set was an absurd discovery
whose meaning could not be left unsaid;
the torture that was philosophy’s—
the parrot in the hall being a caged being,
the cage of which was made of cheap wire
and expensive noise; the chestnut received.