for Samuel Ciurca
His thick fingers traced the words on her back,
the most beautiful fossil ever found.
He loved the memory of her ancient suppleness, a wet pink cone bearing a ruffled crown. A most unusual Cephalodiscid. Tracing gray stone, he felt her tatted propellers flick the tips of his rough & curious hands.
420 million years ago, Rotaciurca superbus was a dainty creature, floating & squirting in the shallows
of the briny Silurian Sea & unlike her kin who preferred life on the sea floor, she was drawn to the call
of sun & the restless company of plankton. A rota who joined those great migrations, witnessed by stars.
She held many secrets when he found her, secrets unlearned in his eager lifetime— he her keeper,
her collector of all ten known specimens. He would never know her rare splendor sought light
instead of the deep & he would never know her family or her habits. But he would love her & wonder her
all the days of his time on Earth. To him she sang & sang sea-life, an anemone or a wheel & he turned
her body over & over in his hand, a wheel within a wheel, ringed with the omnipotent eyes of God’s
chariot, whirling & wheeling round & round. He named her what he saw— Ezekiel’s Wheel —
& she held his adoration & his imagination, for all the things he could not know. He imagined Earth’s
fantastical youth, sweeping the skirts of her sweet turquoise waters across North America, heaving
with golden plankton & sea scorpions, teeming circles of extraordinary life, wheeling whirling breaths
of blues into greens into blues, a primeval sea awash with creatures like floating flowers. Seek eternal Earth’s
entombed secrets of stone, seek her colors, her camouflage, her ion-charged axons & her axmoplasmic goo—
silted & faulted & buried.
—
Elisabeth Kennedy is a Connecticut-based poet who is inspired by love and existence, its many thrilling oddities, and the connectivity of all things. She remains hopeful that together, we will figure this mess out. Currently in pursuit of an MFA at Southern Connecticut State University, her publications include Connecticut State Literary Anthology, Fresh Ink, and Never Ending Poetry.
