Discoveries

As we walked across the Aegean
you were frightened by the flying fish in your hair
I reminded you of the trilobite
the boy gave you in the sands of Peru insisting it was something he had made
yet so old we knew the earth had made it
long before women dreamed and men wove
when the earth was intact except for its moon.

We had no map with us then
not even one the Portuguese made
when they visited that land
and knew it for the first time
its denizens had come long before
tripping across the land gap of the Bering Strait
braving the icy waters between big and little Diomede
and trickling down two continents
until they found more ice.