DINOSAUR TRACKS

          —at the Beneski Museum of Natural History 

There’s something delicate about them, 

these three-toed impressions 

scattered across grey slabs 

like a dead poet’s cursive

slanting toward transformation. 

The room’s full of them, 

spidery, shifting journeys 

that begin and end in silence, 

unanswered questions. We’ll never

know if the words opened their doors 

for the poet, what they had to say

about eternity, if anything.

As for the tracks, their message

can’t be translated either.

Maybe they’re notes minus 

sound, each print  

a score of stars, a darker shadow 

of a God burning to write 

the symphony of everything, 

over and over, until the music 

of imagination ripples out  

across time’s bottomless lake. 

Or maybe there is no God, 

no pattern, not even 

one intentional, elegant riff 

waiting for science 

to transcribe its measure 

onto a new theory. 

Outside, every leaf 

hums quantum music.

Listen, the sun’s playing 

its red violin.

Lori Lamothe has published two books, Happily and Trace Elements, with Aldrich Press, as well as a few chapbooks, most recently Ouija in Suburbia with dancing girl press. Her new poems appear in The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse Daily, and failbetter.