In time we won't have memories. I'll forget then

the easy grace with which I learned the things I still half know,

Of how I read across across the pages of absorptive skill,

That my hands could change an engine, my body swim,

Sleek and strong, against and up a current.

When I forget they'll be gone. No funeral

For the gifts I've given up.

We create ourselves by what we must forgo.

Memory begets children.

I am thusly barren.

Cliff Jumping

I stood upon the cliff and thought

Of how I loved the smoothed-down stone, the sudden air,

Horizons growing smaller,

Of plunging in until I find and read

The bottom of the river,

The curves and silt.

This will not be my highest cliff, and will not be my last.

I see in dreams the shattered child I once held,

Once felt the heartbeat growing still beneath the gloves that should have stopped

The feeling of the ebb: it takes the slap of stinging water to escape the memory of my hands,

The depth of cut geography among the silt and sand.

This will not be my highest cliff, and will not be my last.

Found poem, from Lewis and Clark's journal entry for 25 August, 1804:

Such terror we had:

North 20 degrees west, 8 o’clock;

Four miles, 23 yards wide, 2 miles further.

Want of water,

Complaining of great thirst.

Rises from the north and south, a steep ascent to leave a level plain.

Beliefs in origins – most probably the production of nature.

The plains are open, void of timber

Level to a great extent (hence the wind over the naked plains

And against this hill)

Fly to its leeward side for shelter.

One evidence: a large assemblage of birds about this mound

Produce in the savage mind a confident belief in this

most beautiful landscape.