It’s a staying game, my love, and the sky will stay:
blue or grey, seen by eyes other than our eyes,
black canopy of night, pin-holed by light
or cloaked in cloud, shroud of the still-living world.
The sea will stay, singing its chorus of take this, take this
to the land, as it pounds it into sand, pounds stone into glass,
stating a case it won long ago.
The land, the stone and sand, will stay,
more or less where we leave them,
even if inclined to slide or pitch;
minding the laws of gravity,
which will also remain
after the mere idea of law is gone.
Entropy and the speed of light,
carrying on without audience,
playing tag with the smaller lives that are left:
house sparrows and house flies but no houses;
kite-less wind, wind-sown wheat.
Chairs for a time and silos for longer,
but beetles and grunions before and after.
The sound of seals but none to label it laughter.
No language but the long tongue of Manzanita bark
stripping in the heat of the sun.
The sun, the moon, pulling at the fishwife sea,
mountains and rivers, gorges
where dark birds dive unimpeded;
the perfect tunnels of earthworms,
scars in the grass scored by the hooves of deer.
Deer, my dear, and all the lesser creatures
without anyone to rank them lesser.
The Great Barrier Reef and the Black Sea
having slipped out of their adjectives.
You will be gone, my love, and I will be gone;
our acts and omissions will not matter.
Because martyr comes from witness
and blessings require blood,
but grace is sufficient unto ephemera.
And by now you know this keeps me going:
knowing it will all, someday, be gone.
Even the memory of memory,
disappearing like a green flash
behind an unattested horizon.