Foraminifera

Floaters in the changing seas for 500 million years, 
clocks and recorders of history. Smaller than a grain

of sand. Shells lacy as a sea doily, or twisted turrets 
or spreading spirals of diminishing chambers.

Witnesses to change writing earth’s testament 
in the sediments of time. Shadows in the shallow seas, 

small explosions of life and death.
Offshore reefs, sundried or drowned in salt.

Ten thousand times they almost died from heat 
or cold or noxious tides, but saved themselves

by becoming something other than themselves,
as they are doing now. Read their diary of death.

Watch their range and regions change. Windows 
to both past and future—a nest of perforated orbs 

like shadows in the warming waters, 
a stony leaflike spine, a swinging spike of stars.
 

***


Forecast

And the world will be islands,
shimmering, bright as love in August. 

And the fish among the orange trees 
will be tasty and easily caught. 

And the sun will hover over the papayas
and pineapple in Chicago’s inland bays. 

And the clay of the earth will remember
that once the rain was cool, and 

the way the trees called out, lovely 
as the leaves of all the falls we have forgotten.
 

***


September 

The sun sends its firing squad
through the west windows.

In an inauspicious corner
of the porch the thermometer pushes

its red finger toward inferno. Before
we burned our way into this change,

summer was picnics, long walks,
lying in the sun. Now we clamber

the steep path to the graveyard
obsessed with the memory of ice.
 

______________________________________

Ruth Bavetta’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, Rattle, Slant, American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry and many other journals and anthologies. She likes the light on November afternoons, the music of Stravinsky, the smell of the ocean. She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut.