Once and Future Provence

Strolling these hills I think of the first bipedal apes
and am grateful for the angle where my femur attaches
to my knee. Imagining the Neandertals, much later racewalking
the Pyrenees with a hip-swinging gait in their endless marathon
for marrow, I remember life size figures in the Witte Museum’s
dioramas that populated my childhood with fur-clad glamour
of the deep past, its precious fire. Precious, adjective excavated
from Texas school days, when I made my famous paper mache
stegosaurus and set a course for scientific study, later to be
derailed onto law’s gravy train. Now my nose is back in books
about climate change gauged by ratios of oxygen isotopes
gleaned from sea-floor sediments and Antarctic ice cores.
In cycles of glaciation and thaw, massive swaths of Eurasia
as far south as Sardinia were sheathed in ice, zones of human
habitation fluctuating as seas encroached and drained,
the coastline of Marseilles and the Calanques being at times
miles out in what’s presently the Mediterranean.
The inexorable outcome of climate upheaval is written
in this cliff we balance on without thinking of the creatures
fossilized in every inch, or of the caves below us, water-carved
in calcareous limestone, some of them painted with handprints
by artists for whom the flood wasn’t myth or theory but actually
the future, icy plain on the Earth’s face.