The paths I sweated into, clambered up, are sliding down my
memory's traverse; and the earth is imagining how it will live
after the hominins have had their day.

   “This broken oar at the bottom of the boat.”

Did our consciousness evolve, or has it always been
here: in the water, in the soil, in the clarity of the air?

One poem may take ten thousand years
to conceive, but we are already living in
the wreckage of this civilization.