Marathon Petroleum

“…one after another, and they produced their multitudinous offspring in this earth.”

There’s no metaphor for the sharp flatness

of the till plains of Findlay Ohio,

but imagine a vast carapace of ice,

some primordial, Pleistocene earth-god,

its bulk too large to experience time,

slumbering like a mountain for eons,

suddenly—not our suddenly, but its—

struck dead by the sum of infinitely

smaller motions of light and gravity.

How it slouches languorously to its core

and sweeps out the cliffs and frozen forests

and melts its mass deep, deeper underfloor,

becoming its own bed of glacial drift.

There’s a sense of this immense sinking,

walking the moraine of the reservoir,

of lands so low they could not raise again.

Its warm blood flows daily down the Blanchard

into the green, slow-moving Maumee.