The Time Eaters

What sets the internal clock of species,
regulates the rapid beat of rodents,
slow pendulum stroke of pachyderms?
A dog is born, dies in the breath of a boy’s years.

I searched skeletal remains of millennial men,
an archeology of bone. The cyclic give and take
of osteoblast, osteoclast confirmed the biblical chronologies,
as arboreal rings mark seasons of Sequoias.

In ancient DNA, a taxonomy of telomeres,
I found the answer —
a retroviral presence, the chronophage,
passed through generations.

In the Cave of the Patriarchs, a wind
out of Eden touched my face.
Quarantined in their Garden,
Adam and Eve lived eternal lives —

caught mortality, the slow descent
to untimely death
as they departed
into the world.