The Geology of Us

When time has compressed me to stone,

and my skeleton’s part of the cliff,

the wind will begin its slow work,

composing its elegy if.

It will whistle through cavities shaped

by the space your body once filled,

a hollow and perfect impression

the millennia never have filled.

The erosion will not be a ruin,

but a slow, patient act of reveal,

showing the strata of moments

that only my sediments feel.

And the river that cuts through the canyon

will carry the stone-dust away,

to be silt on a distant, new shoreline,

where our love will still brighten the clay.

So the earth will keep making its map of you,

long after my name is unsung,

on the face of every new mountain,

our story, forever being young.