Making Fossils

Making Fossils

Yesterday evening as the sun was setting

and I was writing at my desk and getting

around that point when all my writing

was reading over the same two lines again

and again, I strayed from my post to take a walk

behind my house, breathing the evening wind

to give my thoughts the silence to freely talk. 

I found my muse (or maybe my muse found me)

beside a stream beneath a dogwood tree:

A weathered rock like an egg among the leaves

that begged, as those rounded rocks are known to do,

that I should pick it up and rub its back,

and doing so I felt a leaf infused

within the rock, a fossil that was left intact.

I’d learned in middle school that fossils formed

from leaves that dropped from trees and somehow squirmed

their way between a couple of rocks, like worms

that wriggle free from dirt to be flattened by

a shoe. It’s always portrayed to be a chance

encounter, just like the worm and shoe or guy

meets girl: another twist in nature’s dance.

But I am not content with that definition.

Perhaps the leaf (and here is my suspicion,)

in understanding it neared an Autumn condition

and soon would fall, jumped on a chilling wind

to drop it among the rocks, and there between

a top and bottom cover it left a print

that let it live forever to be seen.

And maybe that’s exactly what I’m here doing,

scratching my thoughts in ink and so pursuing

eternal life within a book’s renewing

pages, pressured within the cardboard covers.

My imprint’s in print, engraved on leaves of a book –

and when my Winter comes, they’ll there discover

I never truly died, just changed my look.