Two adolescent summers 
wasting in the basement 
of the Peabody Museum
the dampness from stones 
rising along my arms, sleeveless as I dusted 
the bones of
a thousand extinct pigs: it seems
I have written about this before, 
moving down the stacks from drawer 
to drawer, seems I 
will always be writing the poems 
that might have soothed me 
then.  Then as now 
the smell of damp stones, of 
bones, of wood aging, in basements and slow dust, 
pieces of tedium drifting down 
and down on the calm air.

And then up to lunch 
 in the bright fluorescent 
hall of birds, table on 
table lined with limp bodies, sparrows and weavers, 
auks, hawks, and puffins, all typed, all 
labeled, gold-, red-, green-, and brown-feathered lumps 
laid out behind us as we ate. Again
I toss my lunch bag 
into the bin, again the slow freight 
elevator, dim and rusting, 
lowers me down and down.
                        

That day is coming soon when our people, 
all the cousins, pets, children 
will begin to disperse like the insects 
of summer after the petals fall. 
And where do they go, those bees,

those dragonflies? Into the soil 
where they break into pieces, a wing, 
an antenna, a thorax, absently dreaming 
of spring, as the long cold settles over 
them, their buzzing and sipping forgotten. 

And a great age passes like those 
lumbering eras we learned of 
in grade school, or the unbelievable time 
it takes to make a star and its planets and 
evolve a living world—all gone to ground, 

and trillions of years slip by in silence 
under the earth, but then one day, one 
millennium, a gentle humming and something 
oozing, gripping, reaching, this relentless longing 
toward light—urgent, fantastic. It could happen.