Poetics of the Bifungite

You become increasingly
Interested in the gone parts
Of your ordinary life

You witness fast becoming
Collections of trace fossils—
The living that shaped them lost,

Lost without fossils themselves,
So only their tracks remain.
All preserved writing’s like that—

Whatever invertebrate
Soul wriggled itself through the clay,
That lived part left no substance,

At least not here. Here are trails
And hollows of those gone thoughts
That pressed up against language,

And although the written words
Are valuable and useful
And easily repurposed

As tools for the fresh thoughts found
Living in them and through them,
Opportunists, as thoughts are,

They’re never those first, lost thoughts.
Yes. Yes, that’s hard to accept.
Don’t you read for the ideas?

Isn’t most of what you know
Of people, of who they were,
Derived from their trace fossils?

It feels so. You know the gone
Parts were once alive, were parts
Of your life, of other lives.

But thoughts are too brief, too soft
To preserve themselves. Thoughts left
These tracks while thoughts lost themselves.