Still, as the spiral grew, He left the past year’s dwelling for the new.
The river, wider here,
held fossils in the shallows.
These were the famous corals—
Silurian, Devonian—
that Agassiz had gathered.
He made a special trip
from Cambridge to our county
after the Civil War.
The sun beat like a hammer
on huge, silent mudflats:
the Iowa River Valley
of eighteen sixty-eight.
And it was hot. He sweated,
the aging professor—
the tick, tick of his hammer
echoing off the bluffs—
but when the sun had set
six pallets had been loaded
to take back to Harvard:
fine specimens of coral,
some dozen massive sponges,
and one perfect ammonite:
a gift for Holmes, the poet
of the chambered nautilus.
Nearly a century later,
the sun beat like a hammer.
On gray limestone covered
by scratchy, gray-green lichen,
my white, hairless body
felt almost translucent—
ribcage, backbone, scapula—
in the relentless sun,
and sometimes I’d imagine
the companionable echo
of my hammer’s tick, tick
was my colleague, Dr. Agassiz—
or that my hammer was
a delayed echo of his:
that I would be like him,
distinguished, bearded, tall.
But it was Time’s own hammer
that was beating down tick, tick
on the whole river valley.
It was Time my hammer echoed
on the gray rock formations
as I chipped away another
brachiopod or mollusk,
and another, and one more.
South Siders
Not the linden pollen, whose spermy being
dripped, each June, on windshields and collected
on people’s hats, nor the annual,
almost welcome advent through
our windows of box elder bugs—their bodies
drifting beneath our beds; not cob-
webs, dustmice, molds that made our houses
and crabgrass-pimpled, mole-dug yards appear
animal-friendly: but the fact we
lived at the edge of town. A subtle
dust rose from the furrowed fields,
from loess deposits, seams of shale, twelve decades’
leavings of cows and chickens, from worms’ turnings,
to film our mirrors, alter even the taste of
soup, and darken, if imperceptibly
at first, the faces we took with us to school.
Work
That winter, every morning
long before dawn, two lights shone
in the house. A passerby
(had anyone been passing
at that hour, in that weather)
might have thought something
was wrong—maybe a child
was sick? but no, it was only
my mother (downstairs in
the kitchen) and me (upstairs,
just getting out of bed, putting
on jeans and boots). When
I got downstairs, my mother
might still be cutting the half
grapefruit I ate each morning—
inserting the sharp, delicate
knife between rind and
flesh, peeling each segment
so I could eat it with a spoon…. Into
the night, then, after breakfast:
the scarf and gloves she’d made
me wear keeping me warm and dry,
I’d walk three blocks to the lamp-
lit corner where my bundle—
stiff, snow-crusted—waited,
slice the twine and stow the
hundred papers in my sack. War
in Egypt, hangings in Alabama—
I walked my route, unconscious
bearer of the world’s news.
Singing Head
This was the end of town.
Beyond, the farms began—
the frayed edge of the city
beyond the White Front Diner
and the Negroes’ trailer park,
where cattails filled the ditches.
Past Brenneman Seeds, past Braverman’s,
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