—Sometimes the unsealed wound
           turns into a pin-hole camera

for the heartwood—sometimes fungal
           negatives, sometimes faunal traces

           of distant impacts that bred
bygones—some descend from sisters

           transmuted into poplars after
           mourning a brother thrown

from their father’s chariot—some tears
           congeal ultraviolet—entomb electric

           currents with snails along
           their tracks with annelids mid-

segment—it’s the still-life that can’t be
           polished from the pendant, a moment

           divided into epochs, into depths
           of field near-infinite. In some,

summits bloom an early dawn. In others
           pieces of mantle count down

           contractions. In this one, the seas
           prepare a kind sediment, leave

an extinction hanging from your neck—