My worn and dusty shoe dangles
Above a billion years
Three thousand feet of history
Just beneath my sole
The river’s cut is steep
But the fall is not my fear
Instead the eons stacked in shades of red
Countless to a squint
Each the span of all of human history
But not fissure, crack or grain of sand
To mark my desperately important life
Humility here is cast in stone
Clear sky night
Mirror to infinity
My quarrelsome curiosity persists
What chance I am now?
What chance I am here?
And because of me, who is not?
By what chance me instead of they?
Reflecting on infinity
There is no chance that I exist
My carbon chain evolving
Since long before
Amoeba fucked amoeba
And for all time since
Through famine, drought and war
Flings and rapes
Disease and rarely peaceful bounty
The chance of me
Ten thousand eons beyond the one
The other then
Who if not for me?
In the star-light blue it’s clear
There must be none but me
My parents parents parents lay upon themselvesu
And their parents parents parents lay upon themselves
Through all of time
And I became inevitable
And you, Dear, became inevitable
And these words became inevitable
And this moment became inevitable
And you and I became the resolve of all of history
We are impossible to be
We are impossible not to be
Yet the eons insist
That we take this our moment
With and without our will
To enrich the sediment of having been
And become a part of our own grand and deep canyon
Our rich and colored geologies
Celebrated by futures hence