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Zenith and Regrets, Dinkinesh
A chemical wind rustles the silken crops. Dinkinesh the marvelous
AL 288-1 scrounged for purple berries in the melt.
We walked two-legged before we dreamed intelligibly.
Now the world is flat again
starveling drought’s perennial. Sweet Lucy
in your shinbone, your economical cranium, leaf and tuber-fed
the deposition of each epoch crumbling
as a mastodon thaws, predicting degrees of shrinkage.
Did she bloom with child? In the station waiting for gasoline,
a mother whose infant died is leaking at the breast.
Over a bridge cemented to shorn banks, absence expands the ribcage
and the gully is iridescent with the memory of crushed bivalves.
Brown Swiss cows plod the field, confused udders pendulous;
Lucy drank no dairy, her worn teeth and vanished tongue all artifact.
Cow’s milk is for baby cows.
Twelve prime acres for immediate cash sale.
The man at the gate says all my life I’ve labored for these darned cows.
What am I supposed to do? Their long lashes, their doglike eyes.
A squad of local ghosts tread in our tire tracks,
bony metacarpals sifting corn that falls to seed, still green.
How terrible to be disappointed of a tender haunting.
Especially the netted ground-birds suspended with perpetually open beaks.
Especially the vagrant’s children scouring the land, dandelion-stained
half the average hominid height.
And Australopithecus Lucy, wondrous rift girl—
a fossil become relic, fragile assemblage under glass.