Never Not Happened, Never Can Last

Some of you is once, and some
Of you is many, many.
You can’t get back any years

To relive them or fix them,
But there’s a lot of cycling
You do morning and evening,

A lot of repetition,
Every day’s generations
Of surging, sinking, surging.

You slip away. You return.
You’re seasonal as your world.
You carry the paradox

Of the way happening works,
In that each event’s unique,
Each event cumulative,

However unexpected,
However devastating,
However extremely brief,

And can never be undone,
The result of all of which
Is that everything’s erased.

This is a lot to carry,
Whoever you think you are,
However relatively

Strong you are among people,
Who are all at once many,
Many, but each one the once.

One with the Hills

Ok, commingled—
Nothing’s really one.
Another body

Burned into the air
Or placed in the earth—
Compost, fast or slow—

How many remain
Recognizable,
Fossilized, all told?

If you could dig up
All the Earth at once,
Down to ocean floors,

What a museum,
You and that army
Time carved from hard lives,

The taphonomist’s
Final Judgment Day.
It’s too much, too much.

The Earth is too slow
To digest itself.
Some of your remnants

Will never mix well,
Will have to weather
From these hills as bones,

As petrified bones,
Too many millions
Of years old, to go.

Ok? No, really,
Some of your own, some
Of those bones you know.