Admit it—
you wanted the end

with a serpentine
greed. How to negotiate

that strangling
mist, the fibrous

whisper?

To cease to exist
and to die

are two different things entirely.

But you knew this,
didn't you?

Some days you knelt on coins
in those yellow hours.

You lit a flame

to your shadow
and ate

scorpions with your naked fingers.

So touched by the sadness of hair
in a dirty sink.

The malevolent smell
of soap.

When instead of swallowing a fistful
of white pills,

you decided to shower,

the palm trees
nodded in agreement,

a choir
of crickets singing

behind your swollen eyes.

The masked bird
turned to you

with a shred of paper hanging
from its beak.

At dusk,
hair wet and fragrant,

you cupped a goat's face

and kissed
his trembling horns.

The ghost?

It fell prostrate,
passed through you

like a swift
and generous storm.

^{“One must always present something
Among the dying” —W.S. Merwin}

When writing poems about extinction
it’s important that you make the poems
deep but uplifting.

Nobody wants to read a bummer poem
about endangered orcas and their dead babies.
Keep it light. Keep it motivational. Encouraging.

It’s important to accommodate your gentle reader.
Don’t say anything about how if you won’t swim in it,
why should they live in it.

Don’t say that. Honesty is offensive
in this day and age. It’s always been offensive.
How else do you suppose we got here?

Maybe, instead of saying something like,
“The orca and salmon are going extinct
because of ordinary greed and apathy,”

say something like, “The noble creature
with his power and grace shall journey away
forever through the portals of time.”

Good taste omits mention of
(baby orcas, abducted to be theme-park clowns—
decades in chlorinated cages, taking their eyes—

how during the capture, so many died.)
Don’t forget to forget what you know
about human cruelty—

how the baby orcas that didn’t survive
had their bellies slit and filled with stones,
then were sewn closed

and dumped into the sea,
to sink into a silence so dark and so deep
public outrage couldn’t reach—

a depth unfathomable as a mother’s grief
too heavy to carry for one day, much less 17*.
Among the dying, shall we pretend

that in the end, we too shall not be listed
among the dead? Yes. Let's pretend,
when writing poems about extinction.

^{* This detail is referring to the seventeen days that an endangered Southern Resident orca carried the body of her dead calf on her rostrum for more than 1,000 miles in what the media called a “tour of grief.”}

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too 
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, but today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the threat of more wildfires,
the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream,
then remembered that in a few more minutes, 
I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty
the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.