The Hiroya Takagai Gate

At the river's mouth, digging rocks as if engraving letters. Indigo seaweed photosynthesizing discharges oxygen at the Cambrian layer. In the upper layers, animals with first shells overflow and emerge. A stream of trilobites impresses its image like tracks deep in the universe. The root of the rock below the weathered grass is about to open its parched, brittle buds. From where have they come in boats like dry bones? Where do they go, like words? Though I wait . . . though I strain my ears, there is no sound. And yet a certainty.