Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

In three compressed lines, Merrill frames a familiar human narrative—time’s erosions and the earth’s endurance—as a troubled marriage. “Father Time” suggests relentless change, decay, and mortality; “Mother Earth” suggests the material world that bears those changes and is scarred by them. Calling it “that same old story” implies cyclical inevitability: generations repeat the drama of aging, loss, and environmental wear. The final phrase, “a marriage on the rocks,” plays as both idiom (a relationship failing) and image (geological rock), hinting that the conflict is written into the planet itself. The tone is wry, elegiac, and ecological at once.