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.

 

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)