This flat,
scarpjawed rockscape
held you, made you recombinant
in bleached Silurian dolostone,
reefed, petrified coral, and ice-breached cliff.
Cradled, bedded,
au naturel in bas-relief, you were stone
long before my kind—
conceived in ooze—ventured
into air.
Set as if a rare jewel
of line and shape
you lay here on these remnant shores
of an ancient sea where, split-eons ago
you swam and schooled
unaware of the squidquick eye
that tracked your path until
by flash and strike, a lipless maw cracked you
in mid-stroke and left you to bleed and spiral, fall
to final rest a half-billion years
from where, in this present place, my hands
now do their timely work.
You are
the corpus delicti produced
from rake and shift of these
remains here, on Huron's shore, where
cool waves tongue my tree-ape feet.
