We invest our souls
and dreams in stone:
the ten admonishments
Moses brought down
from the mountain,
the silk-shrouded one
we circle in the square
of the Great Mosque in Mecca.
The walls that seek
to seal the empires
from influence, barbarians
and strawberry harvesters.
The prayers we slide between
the limestone blocks that remain
of the Second Temple.
The standing Buddha
that the Taliban tried to erase
with cannons could not eclipse
the billions carved and cast
that have comforted and consoled
the millions through the centuries.
We prize the eternally incorruptible
property of gold, but it never
touches the heart like the current
that ran through me
when I kissed the marble slab
that covers Jesus' tomb.
Pharaohs and emperors,
party general secretaries,
and generals on bronze horses
aspire to outlast
the strange creatures
limned in the Burgess shale.
Will they even last as long
as the humble rotund Venus figurine
carved from a Mammoth tusk
in the Pleistocene?
Does Lincoln now gaze sadly
up the Mall at the Capitol
where lesser men scrabble
for loot and booty?
Memory will not preserve
their battle like the wasp
and spider trapped in amber
a hundred million years ago.
We surely have a date
with some future mute
insensate stone,
a collision with some lump
arced our way by Jupiter's
slingshot. It's happened before.
Some years ago I had
the pleasure to see
the mineralized, desk-sized
skull of a Triceratops
that covered all of a big table top
locked in an obscure storeroom
of the Earth Science Building at Cal.
He never saw the Chicxulub
asteroid coming. We probably will.
Perhaps some Eve and Adam 2.0
will gaze in wonder at whatever remains
of cities half devoured by jungles
or drowned beneath the waves.
I look each day at a smaller wonder,
a fossilized leaf I split from a layer
of Eocene silt that sits, placidly,
beside the monitor on my desk.
A message received:
all life is by chance
and sometimes by chance,
rendered in stone.
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