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.

JOSHUA LEE MARTIN