Dirt

(28-29 October 1989) after Carl Sandburg

Dead leaves, dried grass, dust bury the dead in the brown earth. After a hundred years the broken knife is three feet under the grass. You wouldn’t walk along the creek and see the village here, although this is the perfect place for it, at the edge of the meadow between the foothills and the bay. After two hundred years life is different, and death is the same, a place for roots and bugs, the earth built up steadily above us.