​   Was the sun
   the same
 
or did it shed itself
when mammoths
 
   multiplied
   across snow-crusted canyons
 
and giants cast crumbling shadows
hunting,
 
   mating,
   breaths stretched between drum-faces
 
rimy spears raised against the graupel
blackening Pleiades in a vault of wind​
 
   a song-cage for cheating fear
   smokeless as spent coal
 
lingering the color of days’ old blood
in the shallow bed of setting suns.
  
   We pay museum admission
   to relive
 
their story (nothing more
than a curator’s guess).
  
   Who can bear witness
   to the mephitic passage
 
of time taut for cutting?
Dispensations are

   wooly creatures
   masticating buttercups

interrupted 
by cataclysm.
  
      Was the sun
      the same

or did it shed itself?