fossil corals and other creatures, kananaskis, july 2010
When my grandmother was in the last years of her life, she often retreated into memories of her early years; she spoke of relatives and friends long since passed. English slipped away into the background, as her first language seemed more suitable for telling me about people like her grandmother whom she'd only ever known in that language. The present moments were a gauzy blur to her, and this frightened her; they were much less clear than the past times that had suddenly flooded into view, carrying her into a comforting future where she believed she would live amongst those personages again.
When my father found out he was dying, his interest in geology saw a striking resurgence. He studied it in university before becoming a teacher, and throughout my childhood we were always hunting fossils and inspecting outcroppings. However, a few years ago, he became immersed in tomes on stratigraphy and sedimentology again, and travelling in the mountains became a time for him to recite the epics of terrain formation. This past summer we drove southward through the mountains from Jasper to Kananaskis and I learned pretty much everything about how the middle Rockies formed. He reveled in telling me every detail, as he was parsing every pattern of thrust faults and reconstructing each shattered slope, reading the rocks, the story of their genesis. And it occured to me that this recounting of the story of creation, the slow transformations that made the world was a deep comfort to him; in this time of certain uncertainty, of living daily with an illness that will kill him, it calms him to dwell on understanding the story of the forces that move the earth beyond us.
* * *
when my father fell ill, he
starting reading the rocks:
in every surface crack he saw
the seismic shift in his own
marrow, a mirror of his slow decay:
it’s in the barest wavering of fingers,
pallid colour of the dry rock face.
in this sickness, he says, there’s
no great landslide: i erode.
it’s the slow slip in a steady
rainstorms, persistent wind
twinges, the shake of dead cells
rattling in a cave of riddled bone.
one by one those fragments gather:
infinitesimal ions seeking each other,
pushing through the cloudy morion,
migrations replacing the base.
my bones, he says, are no carbonate.
they’re quicker, like young clastics:
bodies of scrappy particles gathered
on land, wreathed & jointed by water.
we are all cobbled creatures, sedimentary.
clay in shale, siltstone, gritstone, gravel
and sand. smashed together by the whim
of the river & the wind.
& so he softens, despite himself. despite
the heart still quartzite, pulsing intrusion
into the limestone, those mountains of
small lost things:
crinoids and lilies and three-lobed water
insects, mollusc mantles and coral rings.
repetition after repetition in the strata,
an augury, a memory, of how
every tiny dying makes the earth.
3 comments:
so beautiful. i love the image that the earth is made up of all the organisms that came before. very potent!
thank you!
it was something that i suppose i knew, technically, because of the processes of decomposition, etc. but when i really thought about what rock is made of, it really struck me. :)
have you been writing anything lately? i miss reading your words.
This is staggering. Your words. So much development in them. So much care in the choosing and placing of them, each stanza a crystal that wounds and heals. So worthy of the subject. So much more to say.
Can't wait to read what else you've been backlogging!
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