Commentary:

When I was in my early teens I collected minerals and haunted the Springfield (Massachusetts) museum of natural history. I wanted to become a mineralogist and spend my life prowling through mines and quarries and in the laboratory mapping the axes of crystals and exploring the chemistry of complex mineral compounds. Eventually I realized that most students of geology ended up enslaved by petrochemical corporations, so I went in other directions but retained my fascination with the earth underfoot. This poem is one of several in which I attempt to bond the imagination to the particulars of the natural world; hardly an unusual procedure for a poet, but one that I hope illuminates the continuity rather than exacerbates the gap between nature and culture. Embodied in a lava flow, the geological challenge to the human concepts of time and motion offers not so much an antidote to the weariness of mortality but a broader sense of dimension, a more generous sense of the space we inhabit. The natural world, if we are willing to engage it, responds to the self-conscious stories we tell ourselves (myth) with stories so nonhuman they can be exhilarating.