PETM

A waggle of tectonic dances
Tsunamic belches and mantel plume sighs
The earth chuckles
As I turn myself into
Dark red clay.

A bottle of Perrier
Or is it Evian? Trinity Springs? Menehune?
I am quenched
The sun dips onto my skin.

Cin-cin!
Ska!
To your health! I say to the earth.

She whistles sand as I leave the bottle
With the shells and calcite.

Fifty-five million years ago
Fossil records tell a tale
Of the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum
When the earth's temperature rose six degrees.
Oxygen squeezed out from her terra
And the whitish carbonate ooze of the seafloor gave way to an acidic clay. Now,

Plastic, plastic
Garbage patches
Polychlorinated biphenyls
Brevetoxins sour the benthopelagic
Domoic acid scrambles my brain.

White mucus north of Venice
Rhubarb soup on the shores of Landsort
A bloom of algae infests, paralyzes, constricts
The earth twirls and opens herself. As

My skin shines copper.
My bones harden. I become, in a word -
Insoluble.

Venomous weed takes over
And to the bottom of the ocean, I sink.

While the earth, she rataplans a welcome smile.