In obedience to the ancient ritual of all boys and streams,
Twelve year old Adam,
Perched on the ragged primordial rocks with pelvis arched forward and
penis in hand,
Proudly forms of of his pure urine a second arch which descends
merges into the rapids below.
He celebrates
Creation.
Celebrates the cyanobacteria who for three billion years tilled
oxygen into the sea and sky with their tiny manure and thus
prepared the soil for the emergence of the animals who
ungratefully displaced them from their dominance,
Celebrates the trilobites who survived two assaults on their
viability before succumbing to some still debated cataclysm 250
million years ago,
Celebrates the corals and the fish and the Crinoids,
And of course the Ammonoids who went the way of the dinosaurs at
about the same time,
And celebrates grieves for the great dinosaurs themselves those
handsome earth thumping beasts he read about in books.
Mammals couldn't do anything interesting until dinosaurs were out of
the way paleontologists tell us in the National Geographic which
Adam read some looked at a great deal and dimly comprehended.
Coded in Adam's body is the memory of the five cataclysms that
prepared the earth for his birth and he is grateful but he
also knows that sometimes the flood may be so great as to leave
no remnant or only frogs sliding back into the sea.
With his urine Adam does homage to the Brontosaurus, the Stegosaurus,
the Pterodactyl the Ichthyosaur and most terrifying and lovely
of all, the fierce Tyrannosaurus.
His ritual complete his attention turns to throwing boulders
spearing the water leaping chasms riding in his fantasy the
sticks running the rapids sticks that have become canoes
negotiating the rivers of rain forests still undiminished in his
mind.
Ecstatic now in his true habitat,
Adam celebrates his boyhood,
And is only dimly aware of the sixth cataclysm already beginning to
transform his boys body,
Preparing it for extinction.
Jay Edson