Watching a show
on terraforming Mars
and wondering

what Crazy Horse would think.

An astrobiologist says,
“To me, it’s about Mars being like
the vacant lot next door.  It’s about bringing life
to where there is no life,
and that’s inherently good.  If the lot
is vacant,
why not plant a garden?”

I’m going to drop
the resurrection plant
I bought in the Phoenix airport
into a glass of water
and think about this
while it unfolds.

Crazy Horse,
if you’re listening,
please accept my apologies
for bringing it here, and
for the moment when I become bored
and take the plant out of the bowl
to watch it dry up again
until the next whim.

I see how it goes with us,
how we scheme for order
while the earth makes us scramble
for it. 

All that blank red dust…
a beacon for something inside…

all the things we’ve learned
about the way we are,
yet we still think we know best.

They’re working on race cars
in Charlotte, baseball bats in Louisville,
beer in breweries coast to coast
and logo T-shirts in Singapore.
It’s snowing in Massachusetts,
icefishers set their tilts on far lakes.
Couples are planning to screw
tonight.  It’s the day of New Year’s Eve
and the strange and typical rituals of hope
abound among people. 

Dead cold in the north,
high summer down south, the tropics bake
and rain as always, the planet
holds its events without thinking
as it always does…no calendar required
to bring life through death and back again.

We seem to think we matter to the planet
and that we wrote the music
time plays for its parade…someday a hibernating bear
is going to wake up, we’ll be gone,
and it won’t notice anything different except
an increased freedom to be itself.
No engines will roar, no baseballs will soar,
and the only drunkenness will come
when wasps suck the fermented sap from fallen pears.

We’ll be regretted, if at all,
only as much
as any other extinction.