Orogeny: A Lesson in Geology
Sheryl St. Germain
Orogeny sounds too much like erogenous,
so in the beginning of the geologist’s lecture
I think she’s describing a sort of erotics
of mountain building: here, where rock
is smooth and almost soft, she points out,
are glacial striations—and I see
that they are beautiful, like claw marks
of some ancient one whose movement over you,
particular and pregnant with intimate knowledge,
marks you for life. They’re polished to the touch,
almost like the scars on my belly, powerful
and abstract witnesses to what is no longer there.
If a mountain could speak, these striations
would shape that speaking; they’re the wounds
and cracks that give voice to character and geometry,
marks that mark movement of the thing that made you,
then left.
And here, she points out, is a disconformity. The shale we’re standing on is Ordovician, the conglomerate on top is Silurian, the crack between the two, the split that could represent millions of years or not even one, that’s the disconformity. How striking the two vastly different forms look together, the rocks undeniably related in their simple physicality, but the story one tells is of horizontal lines and cracks, while the other speaks in lyrics of circles and rounded stones held in a matrix of some matter I do not recognize. How can I not think about desire and the deep difference that fuels it, difference so profound that sometimes it seems that all we have in common with the beloved is this drama.
I wonder about the cataclysmic thing
that caused the shale to turn on its side
like this, I imagine what groaning
and cracking and splitting must have taken place,
how the earth must have sounded, like a woman
giving birth to monstrous-headed twins,
or maybe like a man coming after years of loneliness—
or an ancient whale rising to make its final wound-cry.
What was it like, I wonder, that massive collision of plates or continents or bodies too much alike trying too hard to get to the same place?
I think I’m in love with the enormity of the thing
that caused these sediments to uplift, deform, fold,
thrust themselves into
this irreconcilable marriage.