Leave It Lay Where Jesus Flung It
What a colossal wrong fall she took—that mastodon caught
several stories down in underwater muck thought:
fuck. & wanted banjo—not this: fretted plunge towards fossil—
sun’s gold tone-ring diminishing. All summer archeologists
in wetsuits scope out ribs in the spring & miss the postmortem
marvel: silver fingerpicks dart bone sockets, grow gills
in her sawgrass wrapped cranium. That’s how bad she wanted
banjo—while sinking, archaeopteryx varmints circling
the surface. Small moon on which she strummed what would
evolve without her: Sparrow, savior, galax licks—air
bubbles blowing out her trunk. No not her trumpet—What
a Wonderful World’s—bright brass belongs to Satchmo &
she’d die anonymous as pearl inlay or those heroines drowned
in murder ballads. For all eternity’s a chorus of rogue
villains slipping roofies in your swamp when you’re a mastodon
clawhammering a busted clavicle past the watery brink
of boomalacka while Cro Magnons carve spears from the bank
& a butterfly sails past the alligator’s teeth. All the world’s
a neck drawn out the spring’s belly where docked glass-bottom
boats rock & research teams mark the dig site with yellow
tape—a crime scene to beached yokels, sweating August for the
long dismembering. Soldout little snackshop & the diving
platform’s closed. Leave her bones I want to say to the craneman
angling for a coccyx. What mastodon worth her salt would
want this climate controlled museum where she’s headed, Muzak
streaming out the artificial cave? But the hook falls in with
a twang. Think you know what’s possible? Each misstep unearths
a miracle: Where the mastodon’s still double thumbing away
her last mistake—algid currents whorl a bridge from her left tusk.
