The Act of Discovery

There is a point where

human history gets

dirty, conflated

with layers of earth

walked up and down

like stories in a house.

Where memory bottoms

out into the mud

of a Gondwanian river-

bed that’s long been

(in the gap since Man-

hattan was but Moroccan

sandflats) translated

into stone, and all that

fell into its filament

is kept there, part of

it for eternity — or until

some grad student

chisels this thing (say,

a tooth or finger bone)

back into existence

and boom — a species

is deduced, a piece

of what was is

invented as if for the first

time all over again.

For what is known, a noun

unsinks from the soil.

The human mind

possessed by what was

before it-

self.