<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 16px; line-height: normal;">The Treasure</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; font-family: Times; min-height: 23px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 22px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence:</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 22px;"><br></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Robinson Jeffers</div></div></body></html>