On my way back from town and all those things that need doing right the hell now,
driving the old highway through the coal field, pavement where the left-side tires hum
and crackle a foot from the cliff’s edge, from the sea, the road that threads
all those tiny towns that got squashed into one Regional Municipality,
past all the cliff front houses, what counts for wealth out here.

Me—it’s the coal
seam sitting side by side with fossil layers, just out there for anyone
to come by, bring a little hammer, take home deep time. Maybe put
it below a bird feeder. That’s the rich thing, a kind of joke,
the descendants of the Cretaceous, the Terrible Lizards,
turned little bitty birds.
I mean, just this morning
I was watching the butt fluff of a bluejay blowing around.
On top of the pole outside my bedroom window, he was staring
at me, waiting for the daily drop of peanuts in the back porch dish.
Saying, I’m watching you human. I know you got food. Steal it. Steal it, I will.
There’s jays on the old highway too. I see them when I stop
at a postbox pullout to drink my tea, eat my bagel, look for fossils. All the groceries
in the back, I think about feeding these jays too, but I’m lazy, and greedy
I suppose. I imagine the accolades birds near home offer, so I keep
the food for them.
Lolling in a cup holder,
a new siltstone rock—angiosperm pattern. Put it by a bit of coal
that peeks up through the ground next to the house.
Makes me smile, knowing black diamond’s all around me.
At home: the Cretaceous right under my feet, my gravel drive!
Looking at the fossil—that plant probably eaten by bluejays’
ancestors, some of it turned to coal, some of it saved in its old
leaf-shape form by being squashed to death
between layers of mud and silt.

Driving into the yard, loitering crows swoop down
onto the kitchen roof, stare at the van. The jays
from the snagwood tree, screeching
fuck you to the crows, and I gotta tell you,
I love birds—especially ones that can’t pin me down.