Museum of Ancient Life

A leaf grins in a rock’s face as if concealing secrets: the quiet of tree hardening to stone or amber cupping light, careful as water in a child’s hands. The shelves of debris proceed by age—Pleistocene, Eocene, Paleocene—a glass geometry cooled by the fluorescent hum of the Ice Age. Beside them a version of a bird leans from his pedestal, wings canopied as if caught in the updraft of the past tense. As we walk the gallery, I am holding my son’s hand the way homonids do in this mural of a family crossing the Bering Straits, trudging from one era to the next on the complicitous ocean. They totter on feet still learning to bear the upright beast all the way to this place where today my boy ascends the carpet slope toward a forest of bones with wonder still blowing through them, here, where unpronounceable names struggle to survive. Where could Eden ever have been but here, with no map but ourselves, here, where the only cost of remembrance is death.