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.