William Greenway

Fossils

William Greenway

I try to get my daughter to take one of my books to show and tell, a proud moment I’ve always dreamed of, but she rolls her eyes in her new give-me-a-break sign-language and takes instead another stuffed animal. Or at least take the two ammonites we bought in Lyme Regis, the snail shells curled and ribbed like fetal vertebrae still here, the flesh gone. Or the block of salt the student gave me, the size of a Mars bar but almost transparent after three million years at the bottom of Lake Erie. But fossils to her are just more rocks, and what’s a million years, much less three to a young girl with a boyfriend already in the 2nd grade, who, she knows, knows everything, and will never be as old as her old man. And, after all, she’s right: a poem really is nothing, just another shell, the flesh gone.

William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is forthcoming from FutureCycle Press. His Selected Poems was the Poetry Book of the Year Award winner from FutureCycle Press, and his tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection Ascending Order. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.