By Susan Barba.
Ore
a subterranean
sounding
rock unsteady
fissuring from roque
has it begun
the new sedimentary
sentence
our influence
on rock
”ƒ
is it an animal
five-generation
imagination
that fails to stop
this scrabbling to
un-earth
killing time
by burning
guzzling
fossils tucked warm
in rock a million years
is it obscene
to call this epoch
of the present melting
ice age anthropocene
after a pyromaniac
race of vertebrates”ƒ
aren’t we colonizing time
reducing the stratigraphic record
to our hour
/ minute hands
can’t earth, the rock of it, remain
intractable
”ƒ
in the multi-volume registers
of rock H. sapiens is the latest
one-line entry
but the mineral alphabet does not begin
with anthropos
”ƒ
it begins with dust
with mud
sun, water
bits of fin, claw, mandible
deposits
in the bank
of Time
”ƒ
Darwin compared our knowledge
of the structure of the earth
with chickens scratching in the corner
of a 100-acre field
Levi-Strauss proposed the study of
entropology, our hurry
to disintegrate, blithely
breaking down all structure
”ƒ
last century men
established
methodologies:
observing
measuring
surveying
mapping
drilling
magnifying
heating
pressurizing
acidifying
liquefying
refining
defining
monetizing
inert matter
turning rock
into bread
”ƒ
rock hounds
lives spent out of doors
deciphering lithos into lingua
created a field
geo-logy, or how to read
the rock column of time
in words and rocks
the order is the meaning
”ƒ
earth the story they’re breaking
legible only if intact
not hoarded
sold to speculators prospectors
petrochemical lords
nor ignored
in the orogenies
of daily new/s
but graven
”ƒ
here
in a field
of antiquity
of ore and meteor
rusting outside a rock shop
just past Zion
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Barba is a poet and translator whose work has been published in Poetry, Boston Review, The Hudson Review, The Yale Review, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, and Words Without Borders. She works as a senior editor with New York Review Books and lives in Cambridge, MA. Her first full-length poetry collection, Fair Sun, was published this spring by David R. Godine, Publisher.
