The Geologist
Here was a sea a million years ago.
Man does not know this, but the stone remembers.
Break it: there is a crab in its guts,
all stone now, a magnificent shape
that refused to be dust.
Before the crag and the pebble, think
that perhaps there existed sorrowful beings,
blood and breathing lungs.
Between the blind rock
and the ecstatic tremolo of the salamander
there is only time.
— translated from the Spanish by Elaine Fowler Palencia, Michael Palencia-Roth