We invest our souls and dreams in stone:

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.