On Becoming a Fossil

There is always the question of when it began,

or when you first noticed it.

One day, a spot of gray on a nail

of the left small toe,

has become, a week later, a pebble.

So that is the way you are headed now,

who was never (let’s face it)

much with it.

One reaches no age with impunity;

your time was hopelessly yesterday

even at the time you were a tyke: your music

was never Chuck Berry but Ludwig van,

your reading not Vonnegut or Hermann Hesse,

but Henry James and Thomas Mann.

Your generation to you was a mess:

half decadent, half barbarian.

There is a certain progression, as, below,

it rises, salt-like, from your toe:

a certain stoniness in your hearing

or taste of pristine metal after bathing,

a calcification of a memory

that rattles between two syllables of a greeting.

A quiet thrumming at the back of the throat

that reminds you of Medusa’s immediate glare,

a locked joint as you embrace a pillow,

a crying spasm in your left calf,

a line of pain hooked between pelvis and ankle.

You stare at the spiral of darkness of an ammorite,

thinking through eons of stratigraphy

pressed to ink between layers of shale,

civilizations shrunk to a cloud

of dry mud, monuments, poems, songs:

the layers of stone in a cliff wall

soaring toward the sun where you climbed as a boy,

dreaming of the flight of the hawk, how your wings

shall weave in the air

in random happiness

from cloud to cloud

as drunk as Icarus as he climbed toward Apollo,

winging across the earth that made you and now

embraces you as you tumble back,

the sun melting your wings—

your hopes, your dreams

blowing away like the feathers of a lark—

to air, to water,

to stone.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.