rumble tumble

But do not worry about the life of the earth itself. No extinction, no matter how huge the territory involved or how violent the damage, can possibly bring the earth’s life to an end. Even if we were to superimpose on the more or less natural events now calculated to be heading toward a mass extinction the added violence and radioactivity of a full-scale, general nuclear war, we could never kill off everything. We might reduce the numbers of species of multicellular animals and higher plants to a mere handful, but the bacteria and their resident viruses would still be there, perhaps in greater abundance than ever because of the expanding ecosystems created for them by so much death. The planet would be back where things stood a billion years ago, with no way of predicting the future course of evolution beyond the high probability that, given the random nature of evolution, nothing quite like us would ever turn up again.

The geological layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.

The stars emerge one
by one into the names
that were last found for them
far back in other
darkness no one remembers
by watchers whose own
names were forgotten
later in the dark
and as the night deepens
other lumens begin
to appear around them
as though they were shining
through the same instant
from a single depth of age
though the time between
each one of them
and its nearest neighbor
contains in its span
the whole moment of the earth
turning in a light
that is not its own
with the complete course
of life upon it
born to brief reflection
recognition and anguish
from one cell evolving
to remember daylight
laughter and distant music

‘The Middle’

When I remember bygone days
I think how evening follows morn;
So many I loved were not yet dead,
So many I love were not yet born.