There Hasn’t Been a Shoreline Here These Past Few Hundred Million Years

A mower or a leaf blower
Possibly a chainsaw, far off

Enough to be uncertain roar,
The physical equivalent

Of the distance in memory
It takes for some kind of nightmare

At the time to be remembered
With patina of nostalgia—

Think of all of geology
As a typical memory,

Eroded, transformed, mostly gone,
Constantly being rearranged.

Some day now will be a distant
Moan on a nonexistent shore.

You don’t have to feel comforted.
Nostalgia won’t exist by then,

And what do you feel, anyway,
For the intermittent roaring

Of whatever eras built up
The sandstone cliffs of these sheer walls

That you live under without much
Thought to what monsters roared in them?