Earth and the Universe

Physically, the speaker is situated on earth as she contemplates her own mortality and place in the universe. In terms of scale, earth is just a speck in space and time. This can be seen when the speaker describes the universe itself as “young” (9). However, the speaker’s vast perspective in terms of time and space does not diminish earth’s value. One of the speaker’s strategies to mitigate her fear of death is to simply walk and lie down on earth. The landscapes that the speaker moves through are composed of human bones. The fact that they contain “ancestral bones” and “cobbled fields” of “discarded skulls” shows the speaker’s awareness of all that came before her and contributed to her existence (19, 20, and 21). These lines show that humans and nature are intertwined.

The Speaker's Imagination

The speaker engages both her body and her...