what is the point of haste
                                   in a place that
     still shudders as it shrugs
     its shoulders of the weight
     of the last Ice Age glacier?

yet I could disappear so quickly
leaving vapor trails
                                    shifted red
through boundless sea foam and fog

I’d be happier alone, you said
and briefly I considered my reply
     but the green
          tendrils of vines
               from Silurian shores
          wrapped my thoughts
and answering was too much trouble

yet I do like people and their leavings
his coy mistress     her wrinkles in time
my children’s crayoned drawings
     of band-aid lions,
     those ferocious yellow weeds
his smudges turning cathedral with distance
their foot-stomping banjo breakdowns

          all of them, shiny beetles
          I’ve collected        and stuck
          through with pins under glass
          to save for quiet afternoons

I am mute, is all
                          in the face of so much time
in quasars from its inception tapped by Hubble
or in the wedge of prehistoric ocean floor
     I found along the railroad track