You long to write—
I tell you the poem has not died.

If one writer is able to make his pilgrimage to Rainy Mountain and reflect the presence of his dead grandmother off this image—a grasshopper upon the creaky handrail of a porch, chirping its song to its one reciprocal mate, its body encased by the low, full moon—then so too has the poem become a fossil.

You retort your wit—
I tell you fossils preserve life.

Trace fossils preserve the motion of an organism, marks it left behind, like a footprint. Body fossils preserve bones, and with a little bit of science and imagination, it is not difficult to locate an organism’s beating ghost-heart. Chemofossils preserve biochemical signals which cannot be seen by the eye, but sometimes the most revealing detection of vision does not rely on the moist eye. I repeat ‘preserve’ three times in the hope my words will be wrapped in an amber voice, preserving you.

You blink twice, say nothing—
I tell you the universe is beautiful.

Someday, the universe is going to eat me. This doesn’t make me afraid because scientifically, from what we know, there is nothing out there that isn’t already a part of my atoms. I imagine pink and purple dust-flowers opening their petals to let me in, and then they will close, and I will be black. But you can imagine my ghost-heart just beyond my spine, listen to its beating in the pulsating of night stars.

You move upon me as the universe—
We learn why we must go on.