Grammar School Field Trip, 1986
John Davis Jr.
In our toll-road town, the river does not mean commerce—
no industry, no mills, no money from the current
that churns and pulls through pines and palmettos.
Instead, the river means fossils. A barefoot rite
of passage for local children: burrowing toes
into bed sand under rust-colored water
to feel for sharks’ teeth or mammoth backbone segments.
Elementary science classes give us sole skill:
ability to read the river bottom by touch
of arch or heel submerged in present pasts revealed
by dinosaur-stepping—a slow and heavy precision.
We grow to expect bones and remains. We are praised
for molars and vertebrae extracted from sediment,
rinsed of burial grit by swift and ankle-deep eddies.
We’ve heard that somewhere south, the river ends
in ocean. Green waves with rolling white tops spread
like splayed metatarsals seeking foreign, modern coasts
where children with red plastic shovels dig up shells.
Here, our rough and ancient discoveries callous us,
thicken our artifact skin against tomorrow:
a time too easily found, too fragile to handle.
John Davis Jr. is the author of The Places That Hold (Eastover Press, 2021), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014) and three other poetry collections. His work has been published by Tupelo Quarterly, Nashville Review, The Common, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere over the last 25 years. He holds an MFA and teaches English and Creative Writing in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, his native state.
