Anne Cluysenaar
Silurian Coral
Strands - fluted, more delicate
than burned veins in wood
picked out of the grate
to crumble in my fingers,
a sheen polished by flame,
recalling itself a little longer
as a single life, which now
disintegrates in the kindling.
But this is of harder stuff,
a calcium cornucopia
secreted from sunlight
and the wash of shallows,
pouring out under the stars
hungry, translucent flesh.
One piece of life’s edge,
dry and heavy on my palm.
Imagine the moon lifting
not only water, but land -
a tide not even death
could leave signs of life in.
The same earth now
will never know such emptiness:
between before and after,
the first rootless filaments.
Not as big as my nail,
echoing, in the lens, the lines
of a flesh so far in the future -
finger-tip oddly translucent,
uncertain ever to become -
this fluted seam in sand.
Polyps still work with algae
to make such stony branches.
I think of chanterelles
in the dark of high forests,
millions of years distant -
one of the many shapes
foretold by coral, a fusion,
confusion, of past and present.
The first plants branching
to centimetres of stiffness.
A log shifts in the fire.
Its edges crumble away,
fly up in a shower of stars.
I shiver as I warm my hands.
The thought of outer darkness
is all too obvious. The crimps,
the knots, the clumping - chancy.
But par for a transmutation.
Page(s) 13-14
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