Fossil Stone from Green River Shales, Wyoming by Richard Foerster

Knightia eocenica

This slab's an inland sea
for twenty-one ray-finned
fish, their skeletons

incused, a spawning shoal
caught in as much of forever
as this world affords. Delicate

ghostings of the Eocene,
mounted and lit on a facing
wall, they bear the finish

of art, iconic against
the sand-colored stone,
streaked with yellow ochre,

suggesting depths and not
the quiet catastrophic
bloom that sluiced the oxygen

from their gills, left them to rot,
flat in the shallows till the press
of time released them swimming

here, compassed in all directions—
a trick on the willing eye
as if the mouths still gape for air.