|
Natural History
There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of
them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.
— Edmund Gosse, Father and Son
The museum guide brings up the past
in me, still the student who made good
eye contact, always asking another
question, while my whispers had
the teacher frowning and wondering
what she had said that was so funny.
And then another of her notes
to my father with his Bible-black strop.
His memory looms like a ghost
barring me from the room
of dinosaurs, where,
above the babble of school children
on an outing, I hear the shouting
of our arguments again, about the “frauds”
of bones fished from different graves
and glued together, how the world was created
at ten o’clock on Wednesday morning,
4004 B. C., and not an hour
earlier. I look at the giant skulls
intact atop the long ladder
of interlocking little bones, fifty
yards from tooth to tail tip,
and know that even this
wouldn’t change his mind, show him
a different god, because he knew
“for a fact” that Clarence Darrow
was an atheist, a liberal, and
an intellectual, who believed,
against the word of God,
only what death had dropped to bloom
the sand of sea bottoms, or stamped
in strata of river clay, sculpted
in shale.
What does this museum resemble?
the guide asks, and we, obedient, murmur
together what is obvious: a cathedral, all
stained glass and vaulting, where Victorians
worshipped the infinite variety of God
that floated on the flood in pairs
above the mud that covered bones
of monkeys, stunted men, and murdered children
now dug up and strung on end to stand
as our stooped old fathers, extinct,
and never to be seen again.
—William Greenway
|
|
