The Treasure

Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—

Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral

Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s

Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf

After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,

Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.

Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely

To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy

That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;

Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence:

Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.

Robinson Jeffers writes for http://www.adirondackwildlife.org/ and presumably lives in the Adirondacks.