after Elizabeth Kolbert’s book: The Sixth Extinction
My heart is a boomtown. A lagoon.
A stuffed pigeon sitting on the white
picket fence of a country in denial.
My heart is a boomtown. A lagoon.
A honeycrisp apple sliced in fours
amongst a group of seven billion
people everywhere & nowhere all
at once coughing sneezing laughing
breaking into a sweat in a torrid
heatwave. It happens. Quickly
the eyelid closes & the proof
of one’s existence– like that –
is gone. Like in the time it takes
to realize that this is a poem
about grapolites, ammonites, trilobites,
black-faced honeycreepers, a tagged
& lonely crow in love with a pink
spoonbill. What are we to make
of the confusion we find
ourselves in? What I mean when I say
I am sad today is that my heart
is a boomtown. A lagoon –
at the bottom of which two lovers
shook-&-jive, play the dozens.
Between them a silence more silent
than the feather-fall of a stuffed pigeon
perched on a picket fence. Surrounded
by a dying & confused people.
By tree-swallows circumnavigating
the sky like hang-gliders.
Header photograph © Martins Deep.
About the Author
