Holocene
One afternoon during a rainstorm
in what was still the Holocene,
although I didn’t know this then,
I thumbed through a picture book
called Deep Time whose first
blank page it said was outer space
before anything existed
to be the outer of, and whose
last page titled “dawn of man”
was just a red hand on a cave wall —
splayed ochre thumb and fingers
and a palm the size of mine
pressed up it almost seemed
from deep inside the stone
as if to push free of the stone
and page into the dim-lit
cave-like air I breathed
inside the school I’d run into
for cover when the rain began.
I held my hand up, palm out,
palm to palm, as if to greet it,
but what I felt was just how thin
the page was, just a phantom
membrane between hand and hand,
and book and air; the nothing
of it passed right through me
into depths that hadn’t been there
till it got inside and made
the pages flicker between
my fingers in a motion picture
of the nothing I could otherwise
not see: stone ran like water;
mountain melted into forest
into veld that ice floes ebbed
and flowed across; entire continents
like combers broke and pounded
onto one another, up
and over endlessly on and on.
The rain kept falling. The schoolyard
asphalt pocked with puddles
down below me quivered
as if to break apart
from what seemed to be reaching up
from deep inside it, all across it, bits
and pieces of tall trees pitching
and bucking upside down
above an under sky the falling
rain was also rising from.
Someone over someone else
went running sole to sole
across the healed as soon as shattered
two-way mirror that the outside was.
And then the storm got darker.
And for a moment I was looking
through the specter of my looking
till the clouds broke, and the day brightened,
and in the sudden glitter I was gone.