We invest our souls
and dreams in stone:
the ten admonishments
Moses brought down
from the mountain,
the silk-shrouded Kaaba
that we circle seven times
at the Great Mosque in Mecca.
The walls that seek to seal empires
from influence, barbarians,
and strawberry harvesters.
The prayers we slide in the gaps
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 millions of Buddhas carved or cast
honored with candles and incense
and draped with yellow silk sashes.
We prize the eternally incorruptible
property of gold, but it never
touches the heart like the electric
current that ran from the nape of my neck
to the wings of my shoulder blades
when I kissed the cold marble
that covers the slab where Jesus
was laid and rose from the dead.
Pharaohs and emperors,
eminent statesmen and presidents,
bronze generals on bronze horses
all aspire to outlast
the strange creatures
limned in the Burgess shale.
Will they even last as long
as the 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 as long as the wasp
and spider trapped in amber
a hundred million years ago.
We surely have a date
with some insensate stone,
a collision with some asteroid
arced our way by Jupiter's
slingshot. It's happened before.
I once had the pleasure to see
and touch the fossilized skull
of a Triceratops that occupied
the entire top of an industrial desk
locked in an obscure storeroom
of the Earth Science Building at Cal.
He never saw the fatal asteroid coming.
If another one falls, we probably will.
Perhaps some Eve and Adam 2.0
will gaze in wonder at whatever remains
of cities half-devoured by jungles or
smothered under ash dunes and cinders.
I look each day at a smaller wonder,
a fossilized leaf I split from a layer
of Eocene silt that now sits under
a palm-sized plastic Triceratops,
beside the laptop on my desk.
A message received:
all life is by chance
and sometimes by chance,
rendered in stone.
