Friday, August 18, 2017

Die-off


When I tell my future great-grandchild that I remember
a time when a lucky human might see a Sumatran rhinoceros
in the wild, she will look at me the same way my grandkids
look at me now when I tell them how we used to plagiarize
our school reports on the dodo bird from paper-and-ink
encyclopedias, and then she will google the rhino and tell me
she thinks they look a lot like a Styracosaurus and did I ever

see one of them? My own imminent personal demise aside,
I wish I could leave behind more world for her. I imagine
this sixth mass extinction will be old news, in her day,
and there will be a page in the newspaper (extinct, ca.
2027) next to the obituaries, where the daily losses are listed:
Arctic Sea Ice (“gone fishin’”); Blue-throated Macaw (“died
doing what they loved best”); Bali Tiger (“what a happy reunion

in heaven with cousins Snow Leopard and Caspian Tiger”);
Coral Reef (“after a lingering illness”). She and her friends
will adapt, of course. No one does adaptation like the humans:
virtual reality games with ninja sage-grouse fighting it out
on the lek; animatronic golden-cheeked warblers
greeting them from a simulated Ashe juniper in the yard.
And while I’m imagining and bemoaning, why not take

a hopeful turn here at the end of the poem in which my not-so-
distant great-grand will have a great-great down the line,
in some still-habitable corner of the planet, who picks through
the Anthropocene layer for  a living and comes across
the badly-postured bones of what they will believe to be
the last living poet to escape the 21st-century purge, found
curled atop the one comfortable chair at a coffee shop,

cradling his laptop, only fragments of his last poem
recoverable, the scholars not surprised to find the words
liminal and luminous among the detritus, though the line
her smile was toothy as a Brazilian merganser sends them
scrambling to the luminescent Google Cloud, leaves them
smiling and nodding to each other like a polite audience
(extinct, ca. 2019) at a poetry reading.

(previously published in New Madrid Journal, 2017)

No comments:

Post a Comment