canadian poet al purdy re-imagines this place in his poem "on the bearpaw sea," introducing us to a dinosaur lashing his tail about and feeding in the swamp, "stoking the huge furnace of his stomach / using some few hundred molars/ of his perhaps eighteen hundred teeth." he laments the imaginative promise of the ancient and the extinct.
on this side of the unborn rocky mountains, i needed my boat, my paddle, to explore the humid jungle. but a rift, tectonic rupture, and the rockies rose. the sea receded. the jungle burnt. volcanic ashes, a thick cloud, a millennial wintertime. so we froze, our calcium shells cracked, we were buried. and water, even as ice, still flows, but scrapes, carves, carries boulders and makes mountains shudder. "being alive in such a landscape as this one / is like staring at a grey weathered skull"
isopods, ammolita, a swimming sea, warm and thick, green and grey, silty bottomed, chasmosaurus, sycamore, magnolia, albertasaurus, all buried. slowly, slowly unearthed and revealed in the process of the wind and the the river cutting deep into the sandstone, the exposure in the soft and tedious carving.
this place is rocks and bones, the dry wind, dust seeing the sky for the first time in millions of years.
