Recent Events: The Fossil Record

by Debora Greger

Through the sedimentary museum
all that still moves is dust and a woman
dusting drawer upon drawer of stony specimens.

To each impressed foot and petrified tooth
her gloved hand fits a theory
only to discount it, expounding a substitute

for why two bodies no longer join but rift.
A Paleozoic leaf recording its fall
in a carbon smear, butterfly wing pulled

from the Miocene, and already the New Life Era
exhibits stuffed quadrupeds, cabinets
standing firm on fanciful claws,

silk-stockinged bipedal scholars cataloguing faults.
Over their samples of bedding planes
she lays the dreamy methodical drift

of continents sundering, savage
in their extended courtesy, two centimeters a year.
Over this, over acid remarks recorded in passing

by a sea overriding a moutain’s breakers
fading from seventeenth-century notes,
model dinosaurs bare vicious little plastic yawns.

 

(from AGNI 24/25 & 56)

Debora Greger’s poems have been published by Princeton University Press. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. This spring she was recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. (1987)