A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: First Person

Fossil
By Alan Wright
Email: alantiff0301 at sbcglobal dot net
(above email address formatted to reduce spam)
December 11, 2007

Like violet lupines among scrub trees,
One measure of beauty imparts great worth
To otherwise dormant time and place.
Such wildness favors the seemingly miniscule
Thus becoming the pearl of great price.
Even the blue Karner
And the common field mouse
Have abiding perspective
Set in flesh by need and survival.

Such are the memories of upturned stones
And a rock-hopped creek
Behind grandma's house and along Court Street.
Impressed upon my story like
The fossil of the sole of my Ked's
In that orange Mississippi clay,
The creek bed can no longer see
What I hear in the sunset of my
Goldenrod thoughts.

If every scent could be recalled
And every sand in the web between
My digits become a year in my life,
The creek knows none the better.
Like when Paw Paw who first pioneered
The creek could no longer remember my name,
The soggy clay floor has no recollection of the child
Who surfaced the high banks
Like some illegitimate offspring of John the Baptist.

Crannies of the creek walls
And the shadow's slow water hide the truth:
She is unrecognizable in no fabled way.
Of no use to fixed children
Or double-dealing adults, the place of
Dinosaur bones and lost diamonds
Can hardly sustain the stonefly much less
The interest of the glazed over young.

Once I returned home and failed to recognize an old friend.
It was hard to figure who had failed the other.

About the author:
I am a hospital chaplain at a massive healthcare complex in Dallas, TX. I am an ordained Baptist minister though many of my Baptist fellows would claim I'm not a very good one. I take it as a compliment.