|
North of Shell Wyoming
That day we baked,
But not like the bloated corpses,
Eons ago,
Rancid in the Jurassic muck and ooze.
The Bighorns loomed to the east, snow capped.
Mountains that made us think of ice cream cones,
But we still baked.
Feeling as dry as the bones we unearthed.
Digging with hand and knife.
The crumbling soil.
With sage brush roots and smells.
Our dirty fingernails.
The occasional breeze could not evaporate our sweat.
We closed our eyes and traveled to the past.
As if we ascended within a growing cumulus cloud,
That billowed over ancient rivers and swamps.
Where we gazed down and spied the dying beasts.
Now, in the gullies that cut this terrain,
We are like the gaggling mass of vultures
That strip carrion from these cadaverous heaps of death.
Long after these terrible lizards have lost the will to fight back,
Except to protect their graves by conjuring a baking sun.
ã 1999 Colm Chomicky
|
