If I Were a Poet

These lines on my face are like canyons
carved by rivers,
so slowly one does not see
the earth dissolved a little more each year.

A paleontologist could spend a lifetime
studying the fossils laid bare by time:
The Paleocene when I found love;
the Holocene when cancer found me.

The canyons lead
down to Sheol,
where memories are erased
one by one, until only one remains:

A translucent memory
of ancient innocence
when there were no rivers yet—
when all was just a dark warm ocean,
as bottomless as a mother’s heart,
a Precambrian world of simple cells
before we dared to walk upright
and start asking questions.