The human state in Rekdal's Soul-Colored Thing

One of my favorite poem's in the collection, "A Small, Soul-Colored Thing" (similar to the Raymond Carver short story in title, if little else) explores the finiteness of humankind in the face of such passionate natural occurrences which themselves are inherently eternal. "The snow [...] kept on falling," as it were. The ethereal way in which the narrator shape-shifts into different, "unconscious" animals (living or dead) is in a way related to Keats' opiate/poetic drift into the eternal in his introduction to "Ode to a Nightingale." However, the turn towards the end, when the narrator realizes s/he's a simple soul-colored thing which is forever exiled from the Eden of nature, points more in the direction of Shelley's "Sensitive Plant." Like Shelley, Rekdal is bluntly realizing the feeble human state, mortality, finiteness, &c. The images in "Soul-Colored" are jarring and brutal, but they yield an innate beauty as in the way one can't stop watching a natural catastrophe. The poem is the jotting down of one of those slips from consciousness, or deliriums that consciousness allows us occasionally. "I was the human that could watch it [...] that wouldn't change." Nature evolves, changes, continues. The individual's consciousness seems not, generally, to continue.