Time Lines

and the deer came on long legs between the trees

and clashed antlers with a sound old and dry as the wind

gnats danced as if summer had returned

for one day only everything must go

through a gray mist that may have been in my head

i measured the mountain with my body pacing it out

i walked among birches nothing but blank pages

overtook milkweed giving birth to clouds

looped past the wild gravevines their convolutions laid bare

following the bed of an old coal railroad

with the leaves mostly down saw far below

the remains of a car wheels-up among deer-tongue grass

abandoned halfway through the age of fishes

when seas saved the mud of ancestral mountains

for 62 million years until a mass extinction

getting younger as i climbed

into the age of amphibians and giant dragonflies

pressed into rock by later layers now sloughed off

and the horizon opened like a rose on ever more mountains