Shane Seely

Worm Moon

“I don’t want the worm moon,”
says my March-born daughter,

who loved but loves no longer
their mucused, writhing bodies,

their otherworldly blunt blind
heads. The days of turning

rocks to count them came
and went, replaced by days

of squealing in the street
at the desiccating carcasses 

of the unlucky, flooded
from their tunnels in the last

night’s rain. It’s a time, 
I tell her, of awakening, and worms

awake to rain to wake the body
of the ground. It’s a time,

she says, of muck, of fresh
decay, of all the wreckage

winter held. Which of course
it also is.

Edward Drinker Cope Writes his Daughter from the Bone Fields of Montana, 1870

There is no shape knowing takes
that is not bounded on all sides
by not knowing, as the scientist

who searches the dry fields
for the thigh bone of an ancient cow 
must spend her bulk of days in blank 

hardpack, scraping layer
away from layer, attending
to absence, saying not this, 

not this, as the dirt banks
to drifts around her. And when
she finds that bone—shatteringly

delicate, shaped as a piece
of life—she’ll see how small,
against the backdrop of the field,

her knowing is. And she’ll hold tight
to what she knows, that earned 
thing, beautiful fruit 

of her ambition. Then she’ll pack
the bone away and return 
to the field. It’s the dirt, 

my dear, the digging 
you must love,
if you’re to love your life.

Note: Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) was an early paleontologist of the American West. He is credited with discovering and naming nearly a thousand extinct vertebrate species. His daughter, Julia, was born in 1866.

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