Black Like Yesterday

It buckles my admittedly
Many times broken, buckled knees--

Not that a million years ago
These sandstones sank in lava flows--

No. I embrace the vertigo
Victorians invented so

Many gone hopes ago. The stun
That comes from my casual sun

This spinning, earthen year is this:
The last of the packed black lava

I can see spilling down the red
Iron-oxidized slopes in place

A hundred million years or more
Before it tumbled to them, blood

Of magma, fire of forgetting
The myth that Earth was made for life,

The last, most recently cooled stone
Pillow ink was no less ancient

Than twenty-seven thousand years
BP. It looks like yesterday.