Tired of technocracy clear-cutting the valleys,
a mountainside necromancer brings home
the teeth from several steam shovel buckets,
throws her welding goggles onto her couch
beside railroad spikes, engine parts,
blood encrusted car parts pulled from lost wrecks,
and begins a spell.
Lighting strikes the surrounding peaks
as the necromancer dances amidst a rockslide,
asking the range of tors and aretes
to expose Mesozoic fossils
in an alliance between dying earth and entrapped death.
The necromancer’s smithy glows magma red.
Visitors (locals) begin to visit and leave.
A forgotten hiker with a crushed leg
watches the blacksmithing from the doorway
her mouth parched – too dry to speak.
A cross-country skier leans on a tree
no living creature able to look at the location
of his septuagenarian infarcted heart.
A child, one of hundreds, from a lost school
looks into the barrel of salmon blood
the necromancer uses to quench hot metal
but still cannot see his own reflection
so, he wanders away again
(he pauses only to take the exsanguinated salmon to his classmates).
The necromancer consecrates the fossils
with her own blood mixed with the sap of each tree species
that grows in the valley.
The necromancer makes sprockets that ride the teeth of five carnosaurs –
three sets of car door wings spikelated with ribs of T Rex –
red brake lights, orange blinkers, splay beams radiant and burning
from a center mass of crunched engines and sauropod shins –
so many moving parts moved by bones meant to be eternally rock-still.
Under the next new moon, a logging camp shrieks with chainsaw and protest,
those who flee discover that roadblocks have returned.