“A few miles away, they came to a patch of marsh . . . and hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

When I woke to you sitting
on the edge of the bed, eyes drawn

like smoke out the window, I imagined
Charles le Moyne’s men dropping

their guns at the sight of a thousand
mastodon bones rising from

a salt marsh near the Ohio River,
thinking how beautiful these tusks,

how impossible
to put this all back together.