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From across the café table, I note how age
has smeared sad flesh across a once firm jaw,
puffed the skin around your eyes,
still young, curious, clear blue.
Bacon rock, comes in slabs,
then you slice it like this.
The thin rasher of rock drawn
from your shirt pocket glows softly.
Held to the light, the translucent agate,
striated with brown,
is fragile, time–fried.
"You should put these slices
with some thundereggs," I laugh.
The remnants of our breakfasts lie before us.
You turn, stone-faced, to me.
I guess I have to tell you,
I've told the others.
First-born, I'm the last to know.
Maybe a year, maybe five years—
just don't know—can slow it down,
can't cure it—it's been a good life,
there'll be some more, too.
Later I think you saved me for last
because I sat with you through dark hours
while Mother died. Facing calamity,
calm is good. Now I am numb.
"I'm sorry," I say finally.
You rescue me once more:
Say, wait till you see what Rose
and I found. Two whole forests
of petrified wood, untouched.
Come see what I've got in the back of the truck.
A box of pieces, once tree limbs or trunks.
You hand them to me one by one
until I can hardly heft the weight,
begin to hand them back
for fear I'll drop something precious.
A limb catches my eye.
You've sliced this piece across the grain,
exposed its history,
the wet years, the droughts,
growth choked off here, but here abundant,
light earlywood darkening to latewood,
again and again, ring upon ring,
and the heartwood, so prized
by carpenters, tight and true and straight.
The weight of time has calcified
this wood to stone, set fluid resins hard.
The corky bark, marked by knots and scars,
is covered with a gray–white patina.
But it is clearly wood.
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AUTHOR NOTES:
Marianne Klekacz will graduate from Marylhurst University in June, 2005, with a B.A. in English/Creative writing. She is currently in the second semester of her M.F.A. program at Pacific University. She is the author of the chapbook Life Science, which won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2003.
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