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Doings Along the Face of the Earth
morituri salutamus
Flowers and fruit trees go untended
as poor honeybees have deformed wing virus,
sacbrood virus, and black queen cell virus.
Hives feel unsafe, as if something could happen
that nothing could explain.
The Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the black-faced honeycreeper,
and the cryptic tree hunter are now declared gone
from the face of the earth. Who knows what they are?
Birds or bugs or just squibs and fizgigs
naming the teeth in cogs
that grind out a wingless, hum-less sky.
But it’s not all bad news:
Let’s welcome back some recent Lazarus species
whose former declarations of bankruptcy
now come across as rounding errors, simple misfilings
of paperwork, or a magic trick run in reverse:
Now you don’t,
Now you see it.
We hail thee, glypheoid lobsters, mymarommatid wasps,
eomeropid scorpion flies, jurodid beetles, and
Fernandina giant tortoises.
We hail your great names once again to be found
in the phone book.
There was the world that denied you.
That was its only power, the power of dismissal,
but guiltless / How can you kill something
that cannot be alive?
You’re young, you’re modern, you’re exciting
all over again—
Everything is suddenly unfrozen from the dark
of lying unconscious
in a glass case or museum drawer, no longer
never to experience
a hot day’s redolent grass,
a breeze,
or tremulous food.
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