There is still a place connections of towers do not reach.
Down the mountains and into the canyon
the road cuts and the road crumbles, narrow, heart beating

on turns in trees where blindness
is blind yet sometimes sees. Ghosts of rock
rise through passing trunks like figures
walking in a flip book. So it must have seemed

one hundred years ago when the last of them appeared.
They were spirits with skin—their battles
fought and lost, their lives hidden in empty space—
stumbling on a world beginning the race

to catch itself.