Extinct, Amy Beeder

Don’t mourn rumors out of stone: those old

persuasions make brilliant canyoned layers,

but it was the Cut–glass Ash’s lot to pass away

along with various flowers, the Undulant Oak

& Bantam Maple (some seeds preserved

in museum drawers) to make way for other things—

Nomad Crabapple. Catacomb Pine. Midwife

Palm & Midwife’s Chat—whose eggs, like dates,

were red before they ripened to an oily black.

The venomous lark & his rapturous praise

of the Upstream Alder’s bitter seeds.

A sacred tree that grew in tropic inlets:

each well–wrought oar, each carved canoe

hewn from its hard wood dozes in dust;

only fossil leaves remain among shards

& bones of the people that lived in its shade;

~

& So? It was poor mad Hart that said

the broken world . . . my word I poured

into the pond I entered once & quickly fled

& slivered bits of their difficult language 1

still persist in other tongues: their verb

to return from the river without finding a skiff

became in Arawak a trope for unrequited love

in Ös means unbitten: the skin never nipped 2