BURGESS SHALE

Let us imagine for a moment we are paused

satellite-like above the Canadian Rockies,

our eyes peering through the lenses of 508 million years

into the cosmopolitan melting pot of a warm, shallow

Mid-Cambrian sea.

                                    Evolution has been frenetic

with her crayons, but as yet lacking the hand-eye coordination

the early efforts are rather awkward: consider

Tullimonstrum, “Tully’s Monster”, there among the weeds,

with the streamlined body of a squid, a single

terrifying claw on a long proboscis like an arcade game,

and two eyes on stalks tacked on the sides

as an afterthought; and over there Opabinia, segmented,

waving its Japanese fan of a tail to impel

its legless self, staring out the world through five eyes

and a claw (fashionable it seems) on a snaky trunk;

 kite-shaped Nectocaris, “Swimming Shrimp”, with twin

tentacles to thrust lesser horrors into its funnel maw;

disc-mouthed, armoured Anomalocaris, “Anomalous

Shrimp”, metre long, weaving somnambulant through

green, amniotic waters with powerful, thorned arms furled;

aptly named Hallucigenia, ancestor of worms,

inching along ambiguously, swaying its blunt head

and waggling its spines; armadillo-scaled Wiwaxia

gliding on its stomach foot; and the autonomous

innersole Odontogriphus, “Toothed Riddle”. Yea, 

slimy things did crawl with legs upon the slimy

sea, nightmares from a dim and distant pre-Eden to haunt

paleobiologic fever-dreams, Nature’s first draft,

that even a native trilobite might take a second look,

and then, one day, suddenly all gone, the Delete

key struck, but not before some always-prepared girl scout

gorgon gave the scene a hard stare, petrifying a snapshot

as a mineral cancer replacing soft tissue cell by sell

with hard crystals of silicon for we second-rate arrivistes

of a later creation to gawk at safely behind glass.

From slime we rise, but only in dying do we chance

to find a place among a billion deaths

within the cool and gentle memory of stone.