Fossil

Having turned away from the present, a mood slides over and locks. A vivid personhood folds him in. A halo as in an eclipse. Knowledge is funny how it can just eat you up:

having named eras longer than any wholesome human projection, and compressed extinctions into black threads, and eaten a nice meal at All Souls College,

(the organ testing its high silver pipes, thinking of the weird smear of blonde on the nude girl he’d seen split apart in the operating theater)

John Phillips tumbles down some stone steps and dies, concussing, his soft body softening further on the edges of the granite,

erasing, in a way, a fish in reverse, the special fleshy hope-lumps—no, need-lumps of this one body peeling in edible sheets,

down down, Mesozoic, Paleozoic, spines, no spines, eyes, no eyes, club mosses, liverworts, hornworts, spiral axils, spores, reefs of sponges, algae,

boiling air and hard braids of wind, sunshine, sun