Dinosaur Aloft

(at the Royal Ontario Museum)

Marvyne Jenoff
From:   Seek It: Writers and Artists Do Sleep. TRed Claw Press, 2012.

How sleep loves bones:
nightly she tends Tyrannosaurus,
comforts through the thundering seasons of its life
and in its death holds deep its darkening bones.

Discovery, slow dynamite, brings into light those bones
and Latin-names them, leaches them of data,
resurrects them into this skeleton above us balanced,
skull posed downward toward a whiff of prey.

Parched spaces pattern the dark bones
exposed against the white geometry of windows,
where stark light through years of days would bleach them.
Is this the end, the static heaven of a sunny day?

Or does the huge head nod?
Is this instead a solstice, one attenuated day
which sleep now coaxes toward an eon of descent?
Is there a greater cycle bearing us round,
bones, data and discoverers, into another dark
where sleep and love are one?

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6 | Poem 7 | Poem 8 | Poem 9 | Poem 10

Marvyne Jenoff's works copyright © to the author.