Another New Book Out by John David Ebert!

The following is excerpted from ARCHAI by John David Ebert:

This book can be ordered here: https://www.createspace.com/7099675

 

 

1. carboniferous pastoral

 

…an explosion of riotous green shrapnel

bursting atop row after row

of spindle thin fern trees

which the broken earth

has shoved up with vertebral force

at the sun

to cleave it with chemical arrows…

 

towering stalks of spiny lepidodendrons

flanked by stumpy ferns

ropy crenellated fronds

with serrate edges

ancient sigillaria

its bark filigreed with honeycombed hexagons

 

bamboo thin calamites

with segmented stalks capped by horsetail heads

 

immense psaronius

splayed with palm like fronds

and flanked by mad green armies of low ferns

and medullosan trunks with tiny glittering knife leaves

and round pulpy seeds

 

that flourish upon the wasted earth

 

here

the sun is cut apart

into thick slats

that razor their way

through the foliage

and fall into the stagnant swamps

in lemon yellow slices

where they join the mirrored sky

and disappear into the murky liquid

 

every now and again

the algal surface of this lagoon

is disturbed

by the huge olive skulls

of leathery reptiles

which snap their jaws

with ivory yellow teeth

at the plague of rampant dragonflies hunting above them

 

blue and yellow thoraxes

bulbous red hemispheric eyes

and flashing translucent wings

gigantic

and they lift tiny pink lizards from the shore

and steal away with them

among the fronds

to feast near the cluttered remains

of lizard skulls discarded in the branches

from previous meals

 

one of the dragonflies has been caught

in the web of a giant black spider

which has it crucified to a tree

and is presently working hard to remove its head

with its mandibles

 

shoals of yellow black micro lizards

scuttle up the trunk of a nearby clubmoss

where an army of newly hatched red and green spiders

are busy dismantling the carcass of another larger blue lizard

its sides heaving like a bellows with its last gulps of precious air

as it lies on its back

viewing the forest upside down

while the lifeblood drains out of it

and its vision dims

 

in a brown pool near the lagoon

a nest of eel like creatures

writhes

at the edge of the silver shoreline

where a lumbering ophiacodon

with striped scaly skin

has crawled up from the depths

and chews noisily on the carcass of a giant millipede

 

elsewhere three enormous scorpions

fight over the poisoned body

of a mottled amphibamus

lunging and snapping at each other

with articulate shearing claws

as the immobilized creature stiffens and dies

 

and in the blue haze where the curvature of the earth

ruptures through the tangled canopy of trees

at the line of the horizon

a single lone clubmoss is alight

and blazes quietly in the distance against a riotous

and corrupt wall of green that surrounds it

 

rivers of tiny beige scorpions exit from the tree

and stream off into the dense vegetation

as the oily smoke blackens the air

and bleaches the sky

 

the scorpion horde streams past the

empty skeleton

of a proterogyrinus

its archaic bankrupt skull

squirming with a nest of infant snakes

inside it

 

near the foot of the burning tree

their limegreen mother

has wandered into the nest of hard shelled eggs

of a lizard named westlothiana

—an early amniote—

and presently has her jaws wrapped around one of the eggs

 

when the mother lizard returns to her nest

she will find that it has been decimated by the snake

 

we leave the scene here

for the jungle darkens

with the onset of night

as the liquid sun melts

behind the horse tails

and spiky fronds of the clubmosses

wasted and dying

at the edge of the bleeding brown earth