“Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing

Freeways are clogged all day

Academies packed with scholars writing papers

City people lean and dark

This land most real

As its western-tending golden slopes

And bird-entangled central valley swamps

Sea-lion, urchin coasts

Southerly salmon-probes

Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills

Along a range of granite peaks

The names forgotten,

An eastward running river that ends out in desert

The chipping ground-squirrels in the tumbled blocks

The gloss of glacier ghost on a slab

Where we wake refreshed from ten hours sleep

After a long day's walking

Packing burdens to the snow

Wake to the same old world of no names, 

No things, new as ever, rock and water,

Cool dawn birdcalls, high jet contrails.

A day or two or million, breathing

A few steps back from what goes down 

In the current realm.

A kind of ice age, spreading, filling valleys

Shaving soils, paving fields, you can walk in it

Live in it, drive through it then

It melts away

For whatever sprouts

After the age of

Frozen hearts. Flesh-carved rock

And gusts on the summit, 

Smoke from forest fires is white,

The haze above the distant valley like a dusk.

It's just one world, this spine of rock and streams

And snow, and the wash of gravels, silts

Sands, bunchgrasses, saltbrush, bee-fields,

Twenty million human people, downstream, here below."

“At Tower Peak", Gary Snyder