Fossils
J. Quinn Brisben
Dear Jay Parini,
Thank you for the book
Which I had wanted as soon as I saw it
Was called Anthracite County, so excuse me
For taking so long to answer; Tim Wickland was
Tardy in sending it, and I was even more so
In getting it back to you, for metaphors
Are fearful things and sometimes feelings get
Too complex for the plain prose Monsieur Jordain
Was glad to find he had been speaking all his life
And in which Darwin’s bulldog, T. H. Huxley, explained
The great mysteries to eager workers with his piece
Of carpenter’s chalk and some magic lantern slides;
Poems are, of course, obsolete just like the slide rule
With which Tim still figures taxes and the silver
Tray on which elegant Arlinda serves high tea,
But sometimes too much collides for ordered prose.
I telephoned Karleen, my mother-in-law, in her double-wide
Among the branched saguaros in Tucson’s glare
And told her I’d been gifted with some hard black
Letters from a Scranton raising, although you now
Live near our friends on Weybridge Hill among the turning
Leaves so admired by Asian tourists and the roads
Marked FROST HEAVES in the Spring because the “Something
There is that doesn’t love a wall” is a pun I did not
Get until I paced that ground, but I have never plunged
Into anything more dark than the field trip mine at our
Museum of Science and Industry just a few miles
From where I write, and on my native ground in
The Cherokee Strip our dinosaurs, discreetly decaying,
Made natural gas which did not begtime my father’s
Arrow collars, although the lowering dust
Made ample nightmares, also mined for art
By Steinbeck and friends, whom you have chronicled.
So I asked Karleen about the French chateau given
To a town already stuffed with fossils as a shell not
Really suited for a library but which her husband,
Great grandfather to my grandchildren, guided
With some skill for six years penning Dewey
Decimals in white ink on spines you may recall, for
A dozen years later you must have been a stackhound,
A bookworm they called you then, fondling thick bindings,
Then burrowing toward something as real as the press
Of a fern extinct for a million years on the coalface,
Coveting the dirty books locked behind glass,
Trying on styles like sports coats off the rack,
Glorying in this anarchist heaven with open shelves
Where the frunt of the people’s labor is read by all.
Alert Karleen, who is ninety, disremembers
The name of that book-crammed chateau,
Aldrich maybe or Allbrick or I suggested
Maybe Alberich after Wagner’s niebelung,
And she told me the niebelungs had left
The central building upright, but one of the branches
Called Providence, she thinks, had crazy floors,
And once she descended from Nay Og Park between
The time the Coral Sea was refloored with fuselages
And pearl-eyed skulls and the time when stiff corpses
Served as sleds near Stalingrad, with her was
The thin-shanked, redheaded ten year-old
Who has been my wife for two third of our lives
And the good librarian whom you never met,
For he left Scranton the year that you were born
And died before I had a chance to meet him either,
And a dead but legendary and unforgotten dog
Who slid forward across the varnished planks
And yelped in alarm, for Scranton was an ant hill,
And you could not forget that you lived on
Compressed past ages that made hard coal
So that Phoebe Snow could ride the Lackawanna
All in white from the veins which
Tangled like the very eyebrows of John L
Beneath the gray and leaning houses and
Trolleys filled with men with a dried-sweat stink,
Pale under blackface who yearned to smell of
Stogies and rye whiskey and think impure thoughts
Of lisping Emma Matso who had made it to Hollywood
As Lizabeth Scott, but mostly they were family men
Who got married in church and sat proudly
At first communions wishing their eyebrows could
Come clean, not even guessing that suburbanites
Would turn their backs on black anthracite before
Their granddaughters received the sacrificial wafer.
I hope we soon meet face to face sitting
On Tim’s front porch with elegant hors d’ouvres
From Arlinda’s siver tray, telling some stretchers
About hanging out in libraries, recalling
lThat ancient Gennan film about a cave-in
And miners who smashed frontiers to save
Their comrades, and, of course, watching namesakes
Shooting hoops in the driveway, and now and then
Raising our glasses to the fossils, a greenhouse
That once existed in Saginaw, a government camp
In Arvin, and all the language in the coal seams
And the chalk beds, for, like old Huxley,
I believe in fossils absolutely.
