Into one's ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain's
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one's dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved...
                                      And on one's dead.
-Which makes one's World, one's Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

Too extreme a distancing?
So let a nearer focus bring
The strange gaze of a sloe-eyed doe
On a cave painting from Lascaux,
Rock reamed by eons upon eons
Of such extreme, intense
Water-pressure as finally
Broke through southward, leaving high
Smooth-bored complexities.

                                                And then
Up through those darknesses climbed men
Working towards each masterpiece
Lit by candle-wicks dipped in grease
Brought up there in hollow stones.

After five hundred generations
We have no other knowledge of
How they would feel, or think, or love.
Their speech-lost. Surely they'd curse and bless.
Their chants? Alas, we can only guess.