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)
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