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Personal Archeology

D. R. James

Imagine the graphable shifts
in your own self-civilization
from proud, young hunter
to calculating gatherer
to steady cultivator: industrious
over-worker of your fragile
inner-child. And notice

those thin but alarming layers
in your sedimentary record,
the relative moments indicating
odd breakthroughs, beneficial
mutations, weathered disasters –
in my case, that deadly thaw
of marital ice, the one that displaced
my psychic shoreline inland
hundreds of miles, submerging
remnants of a domestication
I’d survived in ignorant
and therefore precarious peace.

Any trained observer could write up
the reports, even poems
on the highlights. Why,
I can recount all kinds
of particular days like
geological calamities:
when my grandfather died
and his wrist watch stopped
on the minute he hung his screaming arm
over the gunwale at the Red Umbrella Inn;
the first time I got drunk, so sick
on a buddy’s dad’s secreted liquor
I thought my life would spin forever
out of control; my wedding
when I served the wine, played crazy
blues harmonica and scatted us
on our merry married way;
the divorce. So,

why, you may now want to know,
can’t I recall the eons in between,
those thick, bland strata,
those uniformly-striped piles of years
on years when nothing noteworthy
seems to have happened
but wherein must have developed
the insidious disintegrations,
and wherein I must have lived
over twenty thousand of my give-or-take
twenty thousand five hundred days?

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