It began with blackberries
and goats to keep the brambles
down. An occasional coyote,
impossible to catch, captivated
the life of the mind. For a while
the land was covered with litter
and poisons you couldn’t see
but the earth was still really beautiful
from orbit. Astronauts saw a glacier
in South America that was actually a desert
of salt and flat enough to calibrate
distance from the earth’s surface
to tiny spots in space. Turned that way,
miles don’t mean the same thing,
but someone launched a satellite
that breached the imagination. Llama trains
carried the salt across the Incan empire,
a difficult distance because nothing
ever rises. Not even the horizon.