By Anthony Sobin
On display in Paleontology is the huge slab of petrified sea floor
separated carefully and carried away intact from fossil ocean -
"Each half-inch of strata represents roughly two thousand years."
Clear impressions offer solid evidence for the lives of the extinct,
The curling patterns in the mud of burrowing sea worms,
The death masks of trilobites like fingerprints of the Paleozoic.
In the dents and furrows we can focus on the outlines of their bodies
Just as the they were at death, before there was an Atlantic Ocean.
Last year's student, a woman who will always be too young for me,
stands intently watching the display as if something
Were happening in it - as if it were the movie at the drive-in
Complete with plot and action. As she looks up and sees me
My old recurring dream flashes by - the one that always ends
With Queen Bess ordering me beheaded and quartered, the dream
Which always begins cloudy, with me watching intensely,
As if through a half-inch layer of translucent bog water,
Tiny worms curling under my fingernails like thin brown threads,
Their trails beginning to fall into just the right patterns -
My own hands beginning to give me away. She is happy to see me,
And tells me all about he European summer, her new car and lover
And art history paper she's in the middle of - the one concerning
Michaelangelo's "Creation" far out on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We talk about how "unpainterly and statue-like the figures are,
Yet how they nonetheless seem real in spite of their look of being
Frozen there in stone." Only I am uneasy. It's cold she says
And jokes about wishing they'd start a huge fire in the English Room
I focus on her hair and her hand curling the bracelet at her wrist
I measure with my eye the hard transparent distance between us and
Hear her asking me if I know the statistics - the ratio in a lifetime
Of things we can see to the things we can touch.
On display in Paleontology is the huge slab of petrified sea floor
separated carefully and carried away intact from fossil ocean -
"Each half-inch of strata represents roughly two thousand years."
Clear impressions offer solid evidence for the lives of the extinct,
The curling patterns in the mud of burrowing sea worms,
The death masks of trilobites like fingerprints of the Paleozoic.
In the dents and furrows we can focus on the outlines of their bodies
Just as the they were at death, before there was an Atlantic Ocean.
Last year's student, a woman who will always be too young for me,
stands intently watching the display as if something
Were happening in it - as if it were the movie at the drive-in
Complete with plot and action. As she looks up and sees me
My old recurring dream flashes by - the one that always ends
With Queen Bess ordering me beheaded and quartered, the dream
Which always begins cloudy, with me watching intensely,
As if through a half-inch layer of translucent bog water,
Tiny worms curling under my fingernails like thin brown threads,
Their trails beginning to fall into just the right patterns -
My own hands beginning to give me away. She is happy to see me,
And tells me all about he European summer, her new car and lover
And art history paper she's in the middle of - the one concerning
Michaelangelo's "Creation" far out on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
We talk about how "unpainterly and statue-like the figures are,
Yet how they nonetheless seem real in spite of their look of being
Frozen there in stone." Only I am uneasy. It's cold she says
And jokes about wishing they'd start a huge fire in the English Room
I focus on her hair and her hand curling the bracelet at her wrist
I measure with my eye the hard transparent distance between us and
Hear her asking me if I know the statistics - the ratio in a lifetime
Of things we can see to the things we can touch.
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