Friday Poem: "Dinosaur Hall"

Crossing the dim threshold from bright Independence

Avenue is like a special effect of time:

I can’t focus immediately, the scene bends and wobbles

as if distorted by heat or reflected in a wind-skimmed pond.

My older body is reverent where it stands,

always smaller in dream and memory—

no matter how far I circle some part of me always

returns here, to breathe Smithsonian air.

To see Diplodocus, that sloping chain

of cervical vertebrae, topped with the peg-toothed

skull, donkey grin angled to strip fern leaves by the ton.

Now it merely gargoyles above the mighty arch of forelimbs,

entrance to the cathedral of its ribs

where once beat a heart so large

a saint might be mummified in its membrane.

The nave rings with piping museum echoes.

Duck-billed hadrosaurs do the Osiris

on the walls above, leviathan hieroglyphs,

forelimbs and necks drawn back in death pose,

skulls gazing forever skyward.

All that’s missing: torches, lightning, a bell-ringer—

instead, the uniformed custodian slips the from the crowd,

dark and blocky as a priest, stepping gingerly

around the wrecked in-situ Stegosaurus, not having to look down.

His duster pokes and flies between the spine’s knobbed chevrons,

spinning delicate feathers like votive flickers.

He works from the head back, another neck

in a permanent crook like a sculptor or ceiling-painter.

One whose devotion makes itself useful,

instead of standing there in the blur of stunned childish awe.

This poem appeared in Carolina Quarterly Vol. 55 No. 2.