Excerpt from Other Fantasies for Extinction
Two hundred and fifty million years ago,
before Mesozoic lizards ruled the earth,
our proto-mammalian ancestors:
those great and thorny mammals,
barreled mammals with heads
like a rumpus, bulky breasted beasts
of mammals with horns
and beaks and claws and fangs.
A mammal with a skull like a staple removerA mammal with the body of a beanbag.
All lived together
on Pangea.
Endless North Dakotas
life was lived out on the margins.
This was a time before fruit
and grass
and flowers.
Our ugly ancestors lived off of shrubs
and each other.
Imagine!
Must have been a great and ugly place.
This world for fifty million years
Then The Great Dying in an instant –
sixty thousand years!
What? Sixty thousand years?
That’s nothing!
That’s no time
To die!
Ninety eight percent of life
vanished
We almost didn’t make it.
Continental Flood Basalts –
the Siberian Traps –
leeched out the planet’s secrets
for three million years the earth
inside and inside out.
They are like volcanoes but not so showy more like
cystic acne more like a pussing wound.
Brazen patches of earth,
miles and miles of it, degassing
closer to the ground
Ejaculating over and over and over again the earth
spewing the earth revealing the earth rejecting the earth
enough lava to cover the continental U.S. a half mile deep.
What happened
that the earth purged so fully?
What did it want?
What had it asked for but not yet received?
A cleansing, maybe
hygienic.
Life, after all
was an ugly thing.
And so gigatons of carbon dioxide acidify the oceans oxygen extinguishes hydrogen sulfide invades rotten egg waters bubble to the surface and burst ozone death and radiation mutant spores broad sheets of flame the air sulphurous a darkened sky and hypercanes are hurricanes as big as continents.
The world is endless
there are infinite possibilities for your body.
As long as the planet holds.
Only two species of mammals crawled across that border.
Our great great great great great great grandmothers
tiny
pig like
tusked and beaked burrowers
bewildered inheritors of this wasted world –
the early Triassic –
not a tree in sight for ten million years
our great great great great too many greats to count grandmothers
lived close to the ground.
A way a species might die is called a Kill Mechanism. Among the Kill Mechanisms for the dinosaurs was another, different Continental Flood Basalt: The Decan Traps. In India, for millions of years, it really weakened the atmosphere.
These places now
The Siberian Traps
The Decan Traps
Both of these traps
Now
so beautiful!