Gatherings

How we figured it out, I don’t know: leaves
gathered in a depression make a softer bed,
a better sleep, fur becomes a pelt,
and now I have a mattress and a quilt.
Someone scratches marks on a stone:
“These are my sheep.” Years pass, thousands, perhaps,
and those marks become an alphabet.
Now I tap this poem on a laptop.
And then there’s fire, not that we invented it,
but we learned to feed its hunger slowly. We said
you may have only the dry fuel I feed you --
these twigs now, later that branch, gathered safely away.
Everything we learn, a room in the brain,
and every room the possibility of another.