In the Museum of Natural History
I stand in front of this fossilized man
and think:
You are the only famous Neanderthal.
All your brothers and sisters have vanished,
some presumably only babies or children when they died,
only small skeletons to be eaten away by the earth’s grinding teeth,
and some who lasted long enough to build expert fires
or grunt fascinating stories of the hunt.
Your parents never made it as far as you,
up on this platform in such a busy museum,
not your cousin who always outdid you in life,
not even the wisest elder in your clan,
who marked the dirt with promising signs.
They have all gone back to the ground,
there slowly melted into our component parts
of oil and coal.
Only you stand here in front of the world,
saying Me.
And what brings you here, really?
One day you were chasing some hairy elephant or other
and the ground in front of you
turned out to be tar pit.
Did your relatives see you go?
Did they pause to mourn you a moment?
Most likely not;
in their impermanence
they needed desperately to catch that next meal.
You were off to bigger things anyway,
making your bargain with the earth:
trading in your breath,
exhaling your name,
your failures and brilliances,
swallowing tar,
and pressed all around by the heavy first moments
of your enduring, if anonymous, fame.
David Harris Ebenbach’s poetry has appeared in, among other places, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, and Mudfish. His first book of short stories, Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the GLCA New Writer’s Award. Recently awarded an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center, and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize, Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. |
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