Rags A flood plain’s a preservative. Look there, a knob of thighbone bares its umber skull amid the sediment. Exposed to air it will not last. We’ll lose this animal unless we promptly excavate and wrap the bones in layers of dipped-in-plaster rags. We’ll swath what we can salvage and unwrap it in the lab. Seas come and go, time drags, then suddenly the creature, though extinct, stands up, recalled to mind, almost to life, may even find the niche where it was linked to others; probe around it with a knife, you’d find connections. Leave that, though, to me. You’ll grasp in time how circumspect to be.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems will be issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 