He comes alive again & calls them
ancient crabs & I don’t correct him
though I know they’re trilobites, he
reaches down & feels their smooth
ossified shells, running his finger
along their ridges & appendages,
their sharp protrusions, moves his
thumb across their compound eyes.
I tell him, like us they could see
in stereo, complex eyes that caught
light into far distances, the first
complex eyes on our planet, & then
he looks sad again like when he
thinks of Tatjana & the creatures
vanish into the shades of grey &
grey & grey into lumps of rock
that fight the sea & he heads along
the beach passing a carcass of a
beached whale torn across the shale
& he walks through the gulls that
tear at the entrails trailing out into
the angry blue & the foam at his
feet whiter than the color of his skin,
whiter than the clouds painted above
& finally he becomes a small dot,
a hazy spot quivering within my eye.
Photo by Kevin Walsh on flickr
