As in a genteel living room,
a sterile lab, or mosque,
we have doffed our boots,
and pad across this rock slab
in the sky-blue booties supplied.
Around us, mist.
Underfoot, petrified deep time rises in welts
to prod our soles, here and there
breaking into sudden bas-relief:
a fernlike creature, a creature
like a picket fence, a shrub, a miniature
Christmas tree, a pizza disk – preserved,
like Pompeii, under the cushion of volcanic ash
that killed them. Earth’s earliest animals,
says the brochure, Precambrian, pre–Burgess Shale,
five hundred and sixty million – but as usual
my mind is boggling, Googling vainly in the Zenosphere,
finally it files this in a shoe box, taped shut,
and tagged like a rogue elk’s ear,
somewhere near infinity.
Back here,
in the Anthropocene, South Avalon, July, the mist
is thickening to drizzle. The bedrock darkens,
deepening the contrast. What shall we call
this antique frond, part fern, part feather,
part Art Nouveau and brand new Braille,
urgent and enigmatic as an oracle?