Every Reality is Consistent

When you got tired of walking
you lay down in the grass.
When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you'd been,
the grass was slick there, flattened out
into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,
it was as though you'd never been there at all.
— Louise Glück

Propped boulder, placed as part of a shelter on the rim of a small canyon eroded into the ancient lakebed

Russet lichen, signaling

Faded red markings on basalt surface of canyon wall

Figures emerge when enhancing tones and colors

Detail of above rock surface

Dynamic image -- invocation for rain? gratitude? a "songline" narrative? All speculation!

Namings, initialings -- late 19th / early 20th / centuries

Mammoths rubbing, polishing stone edge while passing through canyon and grasslands countless millennia

Who knows? 

Below, black marking appears on light gray section of wall near crevice

Highway railing bisecting canyon near a pooling place, culvert as portal

---

Lived life is past and present and future all receding at once. What we long to hold on to, we lose; what we remember is often what we would just as soon forget; the future is always bearing down, an endless distraction. I know myself as a glitter of synaptic activation, a flimsy thing easily swept aside. A ceaselessly increasing sum materializing out of nothingness, each integer instantly flung behind me. I am persistent. I am transient. Memory is not a fixed object, and neither am I.
— Sallie Tisdale


NOTES
— Louise Glück (1943-2023) won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature and and was Poet Laureate of the United States 2003-2004. Lines above from the poem Pastoral in her collection A Village Life, 2009.
— Sallie Tisdale from her memoir/essay Mere Belief: Sliding Down the Curve of Forgetting, Harper’s Magazine, November 2023
— Campbell McGrath, from the poem A Greeting on the Trail, in his collection Nouns and Verbs, 2019.

Many things – seaweed, pollen, attention – drift.
News of the universe’s origin infiltrates atom by atom
the oxygenated envelope of the atmosphere.
My sense of purpose vectors away on rash currents…
— Campbell McGrath