Even as bones they were sublime, the sky-
scraping brachyo- an brontosauri,
tree-boned haunches, handfuls of arm-length claws,
T. Rex with teeth uncountable as stars.
In my mind, they were fleshed, they ripped and gnawed.
Crossing Central Park at dusk, I'd see
the giants grazing still, the swaying treetops
hiding some great nibbling head, and hear
them in the ground-juddering thunder
as our subway shot like progress from the dark.
Then swallowed us, like some great whale or ark.
The Write Question on Facebook
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Robert McNamara was born in New York City in 1950. He has published two previous books of poetry, Second Messengers (Wesleyan) and The Body & the Day (David Robert Books), as well as a translation of selected poems by the Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, The Cat Under the Stairs (Eastern Washington University Press). He has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fulbright Fellowship for language study and cultural exchange in Calcutta. The founder and editor of L’Epervier Press, McNamara teaches in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington, where he is the University Director of the Puget Sound Writing Project.
"Saturdays with My Father at the Museum of Natural History" was published by , in a collection titled Incomplete Strangers.
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