Everything We Know Is Soup Skin
Zebulon Huset

The rain pans us of our salt.                  Our precious salt.
             That measure of our worth.
We could all be rich Romans.


The rain pans the soil of its salt.         Its poisonous salt.
             That vicious herbicide.
We invented the salting of Carthage,
                                                    and see sea stacks
            as lost proof of Lot’s marital strife.


The rain pans the earth of itself
                                                    as torrents create caverns
            in the heavily salted Southwest.
Gravity pulls the stilled water toward ocean or through cracks
of limestone to hollow out caves       so close to magma it boils.


Time pans away everything.
                                        Everything we know is soup skin.
All our mountains and caverns, forests, deserts—
                                        soup skin cooled
             on the burning core of molten metal which spins
a magnetic force field around our tilted globe roped in solar orbit.
Every action starts a slippery slope
                                        to a universe unrecognizable.


Or continues a path to a future                      of further unknowns.

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