Elegy

But now I am not I,nor is my house now my house.  — Federico García LorcaWhen the Chicxulub asteroid impact happenedwhere the Yucatán peninsula wasn’t,

a rapidly emplaced

high-energy onshore surge deposit,running, rafted,

rushed all the way to the southwest corner of North Dakota.

There was an arm of sea near the site then, a waterway,Florida far to the south and east and,

like the Yucatán,

sunk,North America split,

unrecognizable

as the glass spheres fell postimpact,some preserved in amber, in pine sap.

Impact-melt glass had a clear geochemical link to the disaster,

trigger of the third-greatestglobal extinction on Earth.

The glass entered fish gills as they breathed,

the sudden inundation surgesturbulently deposited a sediment package in a hurry

overlain with shocked minerals,

an iridium anomaly,proof of the extraterrestrial source, and occasionally

unaltered impact-melt glass in the compact peach-colored  dual-layered tonstein clay bed.

Somehow I feel the fine silt give before it hardens, becomesthe event deposit grave of fish,

their dying alive in the rock,

the very instant of their pain preserved,air suddenly

not air

for them, not oxygen, thusfailing the organs’ needs,

failing mine as I read this, think of my home state

as if geologically X-rayed,a slice of Florida,

the peninsula nonexistent then, about to go again

as the air thickens,salt water surging through limestone,

souring wells and springs already

(the land like a raft, a sponge),as the blue-brown garfish angle around in brown-tinged water,

slowly, expertly — but for how long?

Sea cows float like balloons all winter in thesmooth-surfaced waters of Blue Spring

having migrated from the Caribbean, from what’s

migrating itself nowin:

everything I know gone, swallowed,

the state drowned, the St. John’s River— water drowned! —

the house on it I grew up in.

Sixty-six-million-year-old carcasses preserved at the site in North Dakota.Unlike most fossils, they’re fully 3D

with microtektites in the millions, blobs of glass

that form when molten rockblasted into air by an asteroid impact

falls back to Earth in a solidifying drizzle.

Interaction of ejecta with the atmosphere inducedviolent meteorological events, fierce winds that largely co-occurred

with ejecta curtains

falling on the epoch of the dinosaurswhile ushering in

a blooming of mammals, us.

There were species new to sciencecaught in the climbing ripples,

water-escape structures,

truncated flame structures, steady vertical transitions fromupper to lower flow-regime structures

proving the accumulation of sediment

was brief, rapidly emplacedout of a dense suspension load,

a primary air-fall.

Surges of water raced to the sitearriving thirteen minutes after impact.

The fine-grained tonstein settled

beginning in the evening hours.Emplaced during the “day” of the event’s immediate aftermath

(though it was dark day and night then, a nuclear kind of  soot-cloud happening),

fossil fish and logs aimed obliquely throughout the siteshow no sign of degradation or scavenger activity:

all heads pointed toward the incoming flow.

The ocean breeze arrived every day at 2,the river three miles wide

and tidal, brackish, an inland sea flowing imperceptibly

   — a Gulf Stream in the future maybe:a streaming of water whose banks are water —

twenty miles west of the Atlantic,

the house opened up in summeralways. My aunt (dead now)

came by from her house three blocks downriver,

her voice a little lower than my mother’s,the two sounds ribboning through the house.

I heard them from upstairs.

Sometimes they smoked.There was the stink of seaweed at low tide.

Now, more than fifty years later, the time of the wind’s arrival’s shifted.

My mother in her nineties, still there,keeps falling.

She’s always said whoever buys the house

after she dies,interested only in the double lot,

will tear it down.

Marine volcanism at diverging plate margins, terrestrial seismic  ground movementsin the Western Interior

were strong enough to trigger

seiche waves at long distanceslike the...