Living in Layers

A shout and mammoths shudder. Bones which once frightened you to desperate weeping seem to quiver as you run, back and across and forward again, like some sunblown shell on white sandstone. That light and blinding. Son we are walking again through ages, me reverent, solemn, you skipping, dancing, in and out of the ropes which cordon off, the dead from the dead from the living. – Jurassic, Paleolithic, Mesozoic – and you stop – in the gallery of the great inland waterway where walls shudder with an ancient sea – the artist stopping jaws in hunger on the spines of sharks, eyes (so many eyes) glassed in with something like longing. But this does not matter to a boy lost in some strange cold thrill on a Midwest Saturday morning in July; what matters is the stone beneath your feet, beneath the plexi-glass partition where bones of a great, bulldog tarpon swim eternally northward, block-jawed and dangerous. You jump back and scream in fear,                             no,                                  delight, then stomp and stomp and stomp on the glass as if to shake the fish, the walls, the sea itself to life with all its ages and no one to stop you.