Robert Frazier
My Bone Whisperer
As we circumnavigate Como Bluff
A glow reddens the seer’s face
Her vision folds into the anticline
Layers of these formations
Ripe with vertebrate remains
She reads their hidden mysteries
Haunts their fossil trails
Pressed into Wyoming sediments
The seer grips my arm and settles
Frozen against an outcropping
Truly possessed by the Jurassic
Yet ignoring all the saurid remains
She hears small skeletons
Rattling through her blood
And spirits of the earliest of birds
Circumnavigate her skull
In the afternoon we climb
Like a dowsing rod her hammer
Pendulums back and forth and back
And she chisels free the spiky jaw
Of a bison-sized Coryphodon
We’ll pick and clean past dusk
And collapse at last into
An honest sleep of the dead
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Robert Frazier is the author of ten books of poetry, and a 3-time winner of the Rhysling Award and twice a winner of the Asimov’s Reader Award for poetry. Many poems have appeared in in Asimov’s SF, Analog, F&SF, Nebula Awards Anthology, Dreams and Nightmares, etc. Collections include The Daily Chernobyl, Phantom Navigation, and Visions of the Mutant Rain Forest. He received the Grandmaster Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 2005.
{Editor: Science Fiction Poetry Association is now Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association}
Backstory: “Postcognition is the flip side of precognition, and both are consistently explored in terms of the supernatural. And in terms of happened events or those about to happen. I came to this poem from a less discrete angle – what if postcognition was a rare but perfectly natural human condition, in specific for a person possessed of a scientific mind focused not on singular events but on the evolving processes of time. The setting at Como Bluff in Wyoming involves a ridge where many Late Jurassic fossil remains were excavated (and still are) during the so-called Bone Wars between rival paleontologists Cope and Marsh in the latter 1800s.”
Editor’s Notes/Image Citation: From what I’ve read Coryphodon actually resembles a hippo with tusks, though unrelated to it; it is truly extinct with no philogeny (I think that’s the right word, or maybe progeny) living today. Image of a coryphodon’s skeleton was filtered in ToolWiz to produce a more ominous effect. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coryphodon for more information and the original B&W by Hutchinson.
