The millionth repetition of a single autumn
maddened them. So they left—a starbound species
propelled like sunrise, pointing glittery prows
proud on the last, most thrilling conquest. Man
was always Adam, childlike, forever inquiring,
tossing the apple’s rind to the ground, looking up.
The stars sang, answering his singing spirit.
Earth was a pull, a source of sleep…
After they’d gone,
unimagined things resumed: without pomp, actual orange
sun lowered, blankly. Dusk flooded now-unnamed coastline.
Mute stars flared over darkening jungle. A rustle!
A globe-eyed tarsier, unaware it would die or what
the world was, alert to the least crackle, queried
night’s iridescent doings. An expressionless moon
bulged in stars, a moon white as…? …as? Its brain
asked is. Things were themselves. Weren’t they always?
Ocean dawned, blue and minimal. “I own!” “No, I own!”
—two gulls pecked at a crab husk. Where’s the browned hand,
the tossed crusts? Ownerless boardwalks warped. “Time…time…
time…” Lolling atop trash, a plump rat (such fields,
a world of garbage!) beside a still-worrying wristwatch
‘s caught! A hawk flies off. “Time…” What’s o’clock?
Time for the crime that’s always lawful. Day’s business
is eat or eaten. What, of course, it always was.
Nature adores a competition. Planetwide, what fashions
of keener claw, quicker hoof! Oh, the strange animals!
Ears flailing, an elephant-hare kicks billows of dust,
falls prey to lean, yipping wolf-rats. Folded up winged cats,
dangling from acacias like sooty fruit, yowl at sundown,
Awaaa-ake, awaaa-ake! At the cry, frantic fisher-monkeys
mass at riverbanks, chattering madly, dive in brown waters,
covering scalps with muck, vigilant eyes barely surfacing.
What breathes that doesn’t eat grass, or an eater of grass?
Inquisitive tendrils probed the moldering braille
of fossilian, T-square mortar; lichens’ millennial
moonbursts, gripping fast for the planet’s end,
singed acidy pocks in granite; asphalt, grist
for summered pines’ root-runes, gleamed with wet potholes
blue as the sky-blue future for trodden tribes
whose forbears watched homo sapiens strut, dumb-lucky
street-smart zoo-scrappers coddled to a wagged
pet-look—beasts who, at liberty, smelled man’s dinner
and snarled man’s hunger for it. Who would judge
the squabbling creatures, name their names? Ambition—
can’t each beast smell it? What if Pax Humana’s relics
bedded, as they rightly must, with the carbon fern,
the Tyrannosaurus’ rictus? Earth’s laws hold firm:
hoof, claw, paw wrangled to fill Adam’s stone footprint.