A Couple More Pictures, and Then I Am Finally Back

I walked the streets of my small Midwestern downtown today, and it occurred to me that beneath the concrete and the crisscrossing pipes and wires, beneath the last bits of gallows that hung the 38, beneath the residue of floods, beneath roots reaching the wrong way for light, beneath the buried clues of crimes no one will solve, beneath the tears, the great plates of rock swim across magma and the first-ever secret, the first light, the first death. And then I thought of how that all reverses itself at a faraway shoreline, where the inside of the earth reverses itself, and takes on the color of water, which will always tame fire, which will always cool stone.