Strangers in Our Own Earth
We have been made into something other:
something ancient, swallowed —
badland curves set from the once of subtropics,
maybe single-celled algae and zooplankton. Behind each cretaceous sea
we are the same buried peat. The desperate hunger
of crocodiles and turtles, those nubbed skins
affixed in suspension. What marks us is
the trapping of buried shale and siltstone, the early sternum
of existence. We are confessed
in installments, each realm rendered to gully
and splinter. Let me tell you, an eon
is one of my names. Name me in floating and flint,
mercy and sand. Name me bird,
detail, the very least. Name me the punishment
of history, what broke, what isn’t still lit. Name me the water as it lifted up
what it could to make exiled artifact.
We have traveled a long way to dwell on colors
that lip our past. Fragments of struggle. Though it all seems faded
to inner layers, and no one
remembers what’s nested, the story of dying is much more
than some parts swift vaulted. Time is not simple, not
quick pickled deterioration. I was an artist once.
Within me, perfect vibrance, twin constellations.
You could say the years constricted and then sunk into silence. I stopped
and was lost for a storm then droned
a winter by the window. Every angry breath became
the same consistency. But to reshape, you hold what
hollers out from under you.
Some wings are left in the depth
and hogback ridges. Old reds prove safe-kept by compressing.