an unvisited geological epoch

if i were made of plywood, i would be full of hot coals. if i were glass, tuning forks. strike that-i would be half full of warm deoxygenated saltwater, with a single eusthenopteron gulping at the surface, prowling about for its next meal, not realizing that the trilobites are long extinct, and if anyone feeds it at all, it will have to settle for flakes. an ammonite cannot escape the coils it has set, over the years, because its internal organs are locked solidly to its mantle cavity. i am a vase full of seed fern fronds, a lappet moth nestled against a bright green motel room door, unable to work its natural colors into the pattern. all my archival footage, my collection of yellowed paperback novels, my victorian monographs, creaking under two centuries of distinctive museum dust, are like discarded tapes in a paper shopping bag. I am wide awake and this is now and something truly remarkable keeps happening and happening. past history means something, because in a previous geological epoch, i might have longed for something i could not have, but that was the Triassic and things are different now. i was not expecting rainforests again, and reefs, and an adaptive radiation of new forms. this is all so unexpected. whatever happens, the face of this strange planetoid is producing butterflies, again, and in forms more diverse than before. i can only marvel at it.