poem due today

Homo sapiens are a haunted species.

When they found my brain it was wracked with seaweed and kelp

and the fossilized screams of seagulls I found

in a photograph when I was eight or nine or ten.

In my parents’ attic dust came in like light

weighing down every object; a menagerie of broken

chairs, chests, trunks, cheap

novels as I searched for my treasure.

Instead, I found a photograph.

Sometimes you know, just looking.

Sometimes, if you sit on the coast with hands in the mud

and watch the little crabs and shells and muscles

marooned by the fatal retreat of the sea

you can feel the sun torch the sand around you.

Sometimes, if you sit for two hundred million years,

you can watch the mud catch their every detail,

making them rock making them stone making them

stuck like a dinosaur’s footprint in clay or wallpaper

blackened by your father’s business partner

half a century earlier, extinguishing his cigarette

shouting “I am here!”

with such depth and breadth you can reach your hand in

and pull out this negative imprint of their lives

and know that they had bodies

that they had jaws

that they had fins and flesh and fit uneasily into categories

and you can know all of this two hundred million years after

they felt themselves lying on the beach

and as you find yourself in the present

suddenly realizing that the ocean has left

and feeling the breath of a prehistoric beast on your neck.