Gouges of Us
from El Cielo En Nuestro Ojos :: An Ecological Inamorata Poem Pulse
We look at mud. Marine sediment cores, scientists call them. Over fifty thousand trays, each eight feet long, adorn the mud library in the Palisades of New York. Here the language of sediment traces. Language of shells that compact inside a microscopic window. Aren’t we all windows of some sort. Glimpses. The curator says backbone & you think of your own spine decomposing, layering with the pressures only oceanic minerals & time know how to compact. & how you too become geologically study-able. Here you dream—not of the decay of your bones, not of the unreliability of land layers, not of the Miocene or the Pliocene, not of the detritus accumulating on the ocean bottom, not the pollen from trees drifting over waves to settle into sediment, not the possibility of coring the Bengal Fan to study monsoon reactions to global warming, or even the floating foraminifera gathering in what you imagine their tiny-tiny limbs cobbling together carbon & calcium to form their own shells, no, you dream of the ability to study, of the human act, of the epochs hurtling from a future where hands still exist, where cataloging still exists, where pupils still exist, where all these samples lining all these shelves might contain a human figure to look, analyze, hypothesis, & speak in this language—you dream of our fleetingness. You dream in geological time. Time that measures in thousands of years, millions of years—a scale so large, your skull feels the future weight of icebergs unmelting, unrising, unstartling, unstarting this unnatural process made from the earth trying to heal itself from—us. This cycle back to us. Us-ness. You think of the crystal balling inside the mud libraries. You think of the gouges in these cores. Gouges where researches investigate the sample contents. Gouge feels inextricably correct in human actions toward the more-than-human world. One gouge to study greenhouse gases. Gouge to identify heavier oxygens where glaciers form. Gouge to study the periodic-ness of ice ages. Periodicness of us. Who studies the gouges of us when us lines beds of sediment? You feel a gouge in your left rib, tissues tender as sheets of ice collapsing into ocean.
