There’s a forest
fossilized underground.
I dream of them—
each outlined
skeleton,
bones
crushed into the dark
shadows that shape them.
They have
faces,
even the trees.
You can see whole limbs,
each leaf
a perfect, pointed
oval.
They hang overhead, as if to shade
you from a sun
neither of you can remember
seeing.
Their voices sound like a moaning
wind, the kind
that makes you feel more hollow
than cold. The most common
fossil is the snail,
but just the spiral of the shell
survived
the process of sinking
into sediment, of standing
under pressure. None
are preserved
now. There are still millions
of live snails to take each
entombed
snail’s place. A machine carves
them loose, crumbles
their shadow skeletons
into dust. It’s in
your lungs.
Everyone says that breathing
will come less easy
over time. I spend
long hours in the evening, rocking
our daughter to sleep, thinking
of how I might dig you up,
how to save you from
the rock and the mud
as it’s settling.
