Creeley

"...I recall one night in Placitas, New Mexico. Restless, I had stepped just outside the door of our living room into a small courtyard. It must have been fall because there was a sharp odor of burning pinon in the air, and it was one of those magnificent sharp, dry, immensely clear and star-filled nights. Just back of me in the room there was a bleak argument going on, the rehearsal of a very painful and blocked sense of relation, a classic human debate which can never end except in exhaustion. But outside, less than ten feet away, was such a vast and inhuman place, so indifferent to those almost insectlike flailings I'd left. About a mile distant, up into the canyon, there was a cave which dated human habitation here some thiry thousand years into the past. All around us were the fossils from a sea which had been here long before that, fish, shells, timeless. The Hopi say, 'First came the Navajo, and then the white man.' We are a curious fact.

But it's not a diminution of humanness I wish to make, rather a scale for its diverse presence."

from Autobiography