With each breath we take, the ranger said, another animal
somewhere goes extinct, and she spoke the word extinct
crisply, as though she were sharpening something
with her teeth. She looked at us, one by one,
through her dark glasses. And what can we do
about it? Breathe less? Hardly. The trees
bordering the small field were gleaming in the early
morning light. There was dew in the grass,
and birds whose names I didn’t know flickered
up and around us, here and there. The vultures
already rising on thermals surveyed
the vast swamp we’d come here to lose ourselves in
to find ourselves alive again, we hoped. I’d long
realized extinctions work inside the body
as well as outside, in the world; I’d mourned
my own lost species, as creatures that had once lived
inside me had walked to the edge of what I was
to step off into forever. I’d woken
every morning with slightly less wilderness inside,
less river-mind and dream-time. And as she spoke on,
this ranger, as she started to lead us toward the trees,
I remembered one autumn afternoon skipping stones
with my father, across a pond in the woods,
when a boy approached us with a net and a frog
he’d caught there. He grasped the frog firmly and leaned
to examine its belly and eyes. He held it out
for us to look at, smiling, then he deftly
pinched a fishhook and twisted it into
the frog’s back, which made the frog spasm. He’s fine,
the boy said with a shrug, grunting as he cast,
then waiting for the nerve-twitching frog to catch a fish
as we turned away. But wouldn’t we both
have been happy to feast on whatever that boy caught,
if someone had boned it, and fried it up just right?
—for Steve Kowit (1938–2015)
most recent book of poetry, Systems of Vanishing, won the 2013 Tampa Review Prize and was published by University of Tampa Press in 2014. Other books include The Animals Beyond Us (2011) and Like Happiness (2010). A new book, The Frozen Harbor, is forthcoming in 2017 from Red Dragonfly Press.