Cruel But Fair

Tito & Tarantula: Hombre Secreto









Say you could view
a time lapse film
of our planet:
what would you see?
Transparent images
moving through light,
an infinite storm of beauty.
The beginning is
swaddled in mists,
blasted by random
blinding flashes.
Lava pours and cools;
seas boil and flood.
Clouds materialize and shift;
now you can see
the earth’s face through
only random patches of clarity.
The land shudders and splits,
like pack ice rent
by widening lead.
Mountains burst up,
jutting, and dull
and soften before your eyes,
clothed in forests like felt.
The ice rolls up,
grinding green land
under water forever;
the ice rolls back.
Forests erupt and disappear
like fairy rings.
The ice rolls up--
mountains are
mowed into lakes,
land rises wet from the sea
like a surfacing whale--
the ice rolls back.
A blue-green streaks
the highest ridges,
a yellow-green spreads
from the south like
a wave up a strand.
A red dye seems to
leak from the north
down the ridges
and into the valleys,
seeping south;
a white follows the red,
then yellow-green
washes north,
then red spreads again,
then white, over and over,
making patterns of color
too intricate to follow.
Slow the film.
You see dust storms,
locusts, floods,
in dizzying flash-frames.
Zero in on
a well-watered shore
and see smoke
from fires drifting.
Stone cities rise,
spread, and crumble,
like paths of
alpine blossoms
that flourish for a day
an inch above
the permafrost,
that iced earth
no root can suck,
and wither in a hour.
New cities appear,
and rivers sift silt
onto their rooftops;
more cities emerge
and spread in lobes
like lichen on rock.
The great human figures
of history, those intricate,
spirited tissues whose
split second in the light
was too brief an exposure
to yield any image
but the hunched
shadowless figures of ghosts.
Slow it down more,
come closer still.
A dot appears,
a flesh-flake.
It swells like a balloon;
it moves, circles,
slows, and vanishes.
This is your life.
--Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek