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.