On Becoming a Fossil

by Christopher Bernard

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 ammonite,
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.