This week’s poem takes us into the realm of fossils, the underground and the various afterlives of our planet’s organisms. I love this poem’s careful distillation, the subtle music of its fossils, stones and spores, and how its final turn cracks the whole poem open even wider.

W.J. Herbert’s debut poetry collection, “Dear Specimen,” was chosen by Kwame Dawes as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series. Selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017, her work also appears, or is forthcoming, in The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Pleiades, Southwest Review and elsewhere. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland.

 

Fault Map

By W.J. Herbert

 

The mollusk as it fossilized,

shell set in sandstone at the edge

of an ancient sink,

 

caldera, minaret, limestone

marking time from its birth in a coral bed,

she envied

 

each its longevity but wanted her own

pine box open to the earth.

We had no plan

 

and, suddenly, she was sealed where

no insects could leave debris, no mold

grow: no way

 

her shroud could be embroidered

by leaf spores and larvae, time

loosening her bones

 

so they’d open, umbrella giving in

to the elements, creak and sigh of shifting.

Seismologists say the big one,

 

if it hits way out here, won’t do

much damage. Twist some rebar.

Rip open crypts.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Fault Map” copyright © 2018 by W.J. Herbert. Reprinted from Greensboro Review, Vol. 104, Fall 2018 (titled as: “Geologist) by permission of W.J. Herbert.