Inside my bones, there are fossil rooms.
Neolithic shine, patina of molten ore.

Shake my hand and imprints of jellyfish
wash in on the tides. Cross your heart

and troglodytes mock four million
years of stone, curve by graven curve.

Starfish, dinosaurs, stray leaves slipped
between canyons to mark the place

rivers stopped eroding. Hieroglyphs and DNA
shed the smallest nuisances like flesh

or time inside my cells. Under the cover
of nerves, my eyes turn the world backwards

into sense, skin and arteries cling, my hands
peel the history books down to monumental size.

–James Doyle,
The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water (2012)
Accents Publishing

James Doyle is retired, 75 years old, and lives in Ft. Collins, Colorado. His publications include The Governor’s Office, The Sixth Day; The Silk at Her Throat, Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, and Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes. James Doyle’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and others. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s PBS radio show, The Writer’s Almanac, and on Poetry Daily. Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry has featured his work, and his poetry has appeared over a dozen times on Verse Daily. His poems have been reprinted in many anthologies, including Prentice Hall’sLiterature: an Introduction to Critical Reading, used in universities across the country.