Fossil of a Wing

News: a signature of flight stays imprinted on blue-black strata in Earth’s uncertain crust.

(The body vanished long ago.) The British, desperate like everyone for fuel, mining in

the vicinity of Hell, uncovered this icon of wing, which dates from when flight went

unnamed in air. We glance at accounts concerning “the fossilized wing of

Earth’s first flying thing.” Shall we congratulate this synecdoche of dragonfly

set deep in Derbyshire coal? In its disappearing act, it left behind a single-image

autobiography. It induced the very rocks to recall that once it possessed the golden air.