Our Gilled Forebear

By Brandon Kilbourne

Your time capsule broken open,
we breathe in the Devonian, taste
on our tongues the dust stirred up
from the siltstone relief you’ve become:
a jaw’s wreckage, the brittle shroud
of scales overlying ribs, your retrofitted
fins and their newly crafted wrists, all
that once glided through shallows now
stone, like some unfortunate victim
happening to glance upon a gorgon.
Before continuing to rob you
from your grave, we stay our chisels—
Moments like this, I imagine,
should be akin to setting foot inside
a queen’s hoard-filled sepulchre
or finding a monument’s ruins
hidden away amidst jungled cliffs,
lost epics depicted on its friezes
crumbled by the grip of tree roots.
Yet in restoring you to sunlight,
I also feel a touch of the angler’s rush
of the submerged pull, the bowed rod
and taut line, wavelet waters broken
by sun-silvered scales writhing in air,
our eyes captivated by the anatomy
crowning you as our ancestral chimera,
ancient amalgam of land and water.
Our gilled forebear, long slumbering
in the safety of your stratum, know
that the legacy unfolded from your wrists
today dares the clouds as an owl’s wings,
tunnels through soil as a mole’s paws,
sculls among reefs as a turtle’s flippers,
your subsequent dynasty even finding
among its glory of fur, scales, and feathers
my own hand’s thumb and four fingers
clutching a tool to release you from rock.
With your heirloom nubbins of bone
that braced your fins on streamside mud,
you bestowed to your descendants
the sky, the earth, and all the oceans,
as if some primordial and doting
parent that had wished for its children
lives redefining what can even be
imagined, giving them and the branching
lines of their progeny possibilities
ever evolving, whole worlds beyond
the reach of a fish, realms entered
just by stepping out of the water.