Geological Time
June 16 2026
It was a bowl
carved into the earth.
As if the perfect circle
was not just an ideal
of Greek philosophers
and human imagining,
a metaphor for virtue.
A crater lake
where a jagged chunk of rock
at hypersonic speed
collided with earth
unthinkable eons ago.
A violent collision
that time has transformed
into a pastoral swimming hole;
cold clear water
on a sultry afternoon.
Where drunken adolescents
do backflips
off a high rocky ledge,
showing-off for girlfriends
who’d rather soak up the sun
and talk among themselves
than watch callow young men
perform feeble attempts
to catch an eye;
the art of seduction
reduced to juvenile thrills.
The vastness of geological time
and the violence of the cosmos
intersecting
on this soft summer day
with fleeting human lives.
The collision
of blasted rock
with fragile flesh.
Of our few quick decades
with unimaginable millennia.
And of solipsistic youth
with a universe
that’s blankly indifferent to them
and too vast to comprehend.
But the kids, frolicking in the sun
are oblivious.
They are living for now,
and the perfect circle
that rims the fresh-water lake
is simply how things are.
For them, there is no history;
just girls and beer
and getting an even tan.
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