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The Oldest Rock in the World

A news item: Oldest rocks in the world found on barren Quebec shore

And brought my hand down on the butterfly

And felt the rock move beneath my hand.

—Irving Layton, “Butterfly on Rock”

In memory of Irving Layton

They look as if they are in mid-tumble

out of the bare and windswept swathe

of outcropping bedrock on Hudson Bay’s

eastern shore a one-hour canoe trip

south of Inukjuak. These boulders

of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt—

four and a third billion years old,

dating back to a mere three hundred

million years after the globe formed

out of a cloud of cosmic debris and dust.

When the planet was being pummelled

by meteors, comets and asteroids,

microbes interacted with iron

in the primordial seas and emerged

as Earth’s very earliest life,

and nestled in sediment and wrote

their bio signature in the rust that fills

these boulders’ creases. Now beyond

the treeline, beyond houses, the boulders

have sat longer than the combined lifespans

of countless generations of animals—

far longer than human history

and any dreaming of the way within rock

or of a dying back to when only rock

framed what would be wind for human breath.

Now the microbe might bless us. Allow

us to stand trembling in bright, bright light.

Witness our core, the one annunciation.

Hear us: from out of the depths have we

called thee, from out of our will and wonder—

the doors in us so closed, we think the door

to rock is shut. We cannot die or love enough—

and love, though it brings us to its door

and unlocks it for us, will not follow—

and our signatures nestle in time and we

forget them. Wind is in a hand of force

that wraps around wind, and the rock has moved

and taken our hand, our hand made of nothing

other than what the rock is made of—

in death we lose nothing that is not

of the death and life of this rock. The wind

moves endlessly, and the rock moves around

the wind, and the planet moves around

the wind and around the sun, and around

everlasting cosmic debris and dust.

Wind is rushing through the oldest place

we have named. The song it sings is learning

itself, beginning and ending with Earth.

More names than we can know are rushing through,

and within the names the rock is opening.