Glow Up

What if everything that’s happened
Has really happened? The ledger
Grows larger continually—

It’s all there and only growing,
The vanishings and destructions
Also adding to the record

Of continual happening,
Of cumulative creation.
Nothing undone, no going back,

As the loon warbles on the pond
About to disappear from drought,
Part of its future history,

As the mule deer eye passing trucks,
Their ears alert, so big and furred
They look more like fuzzy antlers,

Almost pronghorns at a distance,
Pronghorns that are declining now,
Their original predators

Hypothesized to be long gone,
Since they’re too fast for coyotes
Or anything but trucks and cars,

Part of Earth’s future history,
Earth beginning to feel its way
Around its local neighborhood,

A round infant spreading fingers
To feel how far away things are,
How some things are not part of it,

How it is Earth, scabbed with living,
An atmosphere more than craters,
But less than clouds all the way down.

Living, sure, living’s part of it,
And so dying, which is living’s
Loathsome way of going away,

But life’s a student everywhere,
And maybe lives from Earth will learn,
Or bump into some other kind

Of life and learn from that. Or not.
Whatever’s lost, whatever’s learned,
Whatever goes, whatever dies,

It could be it only adds up—
Asymmetrical, incomplete,
With tiny, fossil symmetries

Adding and adding to the pile,
That splotchy background “face of God”
We’re all adding to, dot by dot.