What They'll Say in a Thousand Years

Ice spikes the rungs of our fire escape
like the teeth of a prehistoric creature
that would swallow us whole, if it could

reach through this fiercely shining glass
into the kitchen, where we sit together
at breakfast again. After this winter passes,

the next and the next, hors d'oeuvre for a monster
fattened on time, what will survive
of us here? I think they'll find the plainest tools--

a grainless spoon, our enamel stock pot stripped
to iron core, an oxidized black skillet.
Mistaking petrified dill for pine, they'll speculate

that a grove rose at the site of the granite counter.
"A primitive people who ate outdoors,"
a plaque above glass might say, skipping

the words passed across this wooden slab
hundreds, no thousands of days.
But then they'll get it right: as if arranging

a hominid's scattered bones,
they'll reconstruct the frame that held
life together: each morning, a flame.

Then egg and bread, water,
at night, oil and wine--each element burned
to heat, propelling us daily from caves

of sleep, outside, into the beast's
maw, and back to the fire
again and again, to eat.



Maria Terrone

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