By Cara J. Spindler


Eleven thousand years ago, the glaciers striated rocks,
ground trees and dirt from cliffs. Sea cows
swam off the coast of New Jersey, crocodiles journeyed
from the Indian Ocean up the Nile. On the Devonian shield,
mastodons watched the ice. Each summer, the onslaught slowed
and melted to create a river of muddy orange,
a moraine valley, dust litter of pebbles, rocks, boulders–

if these rocks had been granite the river would be gray
like cold asphalt. The sabertooths would taste dental fillings,
disintegrated orthodontist offices. Smells drifting down the valley
would whisper the future of expressways, steel-statues-bearing-cities.
If these rocks had been granite, the mastodons could have divined infinity,
or at least believed in it like us–

Instead, the sabertooths drank water flavored by sandstone,
imagined only beaches, the teas and summer poplins
of Chicago people. Lucid under their claws was Singapore,
the town now buried under dunes
where the Kalamazoo River feeds into Lake Michigan.
Their images of the future were sepia-flavored
and when the ice dam burst
the flood swept past Chicago and gored out the tar pits.
A boulder rests in southern Illinois,
runaway carried by an iceberg, a sand spray
like a careless woman throwing packages to the ground;
to decipher its starting point, it was an age.

Spindler '99 of Holland, Michigan, was Michigan Today's 1998-99 student intern. She won a total of $5,000 in Hopwood awards during her undergraduate career. An earlier version of "Geomancy" (the practice of divination by interpreting geographic features) was part of a manuscript that received a Winter '99 Hopwood Minor Award in in Poetry.

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