Human folly is to believe our ziggurat is real, a really long time. But as Geology’s founder Sir George Lyell declared only as recently as 1830, “Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them.” Alternately, the Talking Heads circa 2009 offered “same as it ever was, look where my hand was / time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us.” Watching the days go by, Matthew Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument captures this eroded sequence by tracking the architecture of human experience, the inevitable falling away and coming together of all matter, and the collaborative acts of imagination by which humans might, if not extend, meaningfully ornament the Anthropocene. From the ekphrastic conversations between Cooperman and visual artists Simonetta Moro and Peter Richards on matters varied as Wittgenstein, the panopticon and the Gulf Wars, to the poetics of drought emerged through erasure with Ed Dorn’s famous study of the Great Basin, The Shoshoneans, Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument glyphs “in the long run recurrence / the stacking of shells / days certain seasons / the steeple accrues.”