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Posts Tagged ‘geology’

Big Picture

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 27, 2022| 13 Comments »




On a rocky white outcrop,
Ulli and I stand in silence
at the edge of the canyon,
held by layers that range
from the Permian to the Cretaceous,
and Ulli begins to sing
a song we sang twenty years ago
and, from the strata of memory,
I unearth the German lyric,
excavate the harmony,
and we join our voices
to the structuring of time,
just one more arrangement
of temporal events
added to the linear record
since the singularity.
And the sound waves tremble
in the sensitive membrane drum
between the middle ear
and the cochlea—
a song of connection,
a song of fading light,
a song that somehow
has origins in the Ichthyostega
that crawled from the sea,
the development of Broca’s area
in the left frontal lobe of the brain,
the mountaineers who would sing
to each other across the Alps at dusk,
and this wonderful woman who
brought these words and this tune from Europe
and taught them to me in Colorado
so that decades later
we might stand side by side on this cliff
and know ourselves lucky—
after all that has happened—
lucky to find ourselves in the same remote place
singing the same familiar song,
the molecules a spiraling ricochet of praise,
our song itself part of the matter
that makes the world,
part of a pattern that is ever overlapping.
Is it any wonder
I cried?

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Coming Together

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 10, 2022| 8 Comments »

 
It seems too slow,
this moving toward each other,
toward peace.
The heart is eager for union,
longs for grounding between continents,
longs for connection, for wholeness,
instead of all this fracture.
Do the tectonic plates
remember what it was
to be Pangaea? Can the heart
remember a time before
it was defined by rifting
and brokenness?
I have read that the next supercontinent
will form in 200 million years—
that we’re halfway through
the scattered phase.
Oh, we are so scattered.
They say the pace of the plates
is comparable to the speed
at which our fingernails grow.
Oh, so slow, this coming together.
Yet it happens. It happens.
Let the heart know
what the land knows: It happens.
 

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Global Slowing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 21, 2021| Leave a Comment »




It goes so fast, they say,
and clearly they don’t mean
today, which moves at the speed
of tectonic plates, not today
when holding a child
means not holding
that child because
they refuse to be held.
Sometimes, being a mother
is to move at the rate
of fear, the rate
of betrayal, the rate
of loss. Today,
to be a mother
is be ancient
oceanic crust that creeps
at ten centimeters a year.
Someday, perhaps tomorrow,
love will again be meteor,
but today it’s intense heat
at the core. It’s the slow scrape
of two great plates,
something cool
waiting to be warmed.

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Isostasy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 14, 2018| Leave a Comment »

 

 

 

Danny says the continent is rising,

it rises as the glaciers melt, it’s rising

for the last ten thousand years.

 

How slowly things change, invisibly

until the time we cannot recognize

the world we thought we knew.

 

How slowly things change, beyond

our ability to measure, but they do, love,

the crust now floating above the mantle.

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