Permanence
Starlight older than humanity skips and splashes, like a handful of pebbles, into dark puddles behind my eyes. Some of those stars are dead by now, long ago extinguished or exploded. It has taken their fossils thousands of years to reach me here in my backyard. Beside my left eye is a scar that, though it doesn’t have the permanence of light, will be there as long as I’m alive. I often drive by the hospital where I got those stitches. I might die in that hospital someday.

Footprints
One summer I left footprints on a beach in California, then I watched as the sea lifted itself to slap them away. Another summer I tracked mud into the house after playing in a rainstorm. That winter I followed my father out of the house, stepping where he stepped. My father had a telescope. He told me that astronauts had left footprints on the moon where nothing could ever erase them. Those footprints will be there long before I track mud into my mother’s house and stand in my father’s footprints. They will be there long after those of the men who carry me into the ground.