Pawtucket Arts Poetry2

I try to look at the big picture. The sun, ardent tongue
licking us like a mother besotted

with her new cub, will burn out anyway. Everything
is transitory. How do we know

the decay of our own intimate planet isn't some dicey,
but normal stage, like kids

go through when they hit adolescence, strewing their rooms
with diet Coke cans, scoring drugs

in the cafeteria. It's scary, but most of them turn out okay. I think about
the meteor that decimated the dinosaurs.

And before that, the volcanoes of the Permian period--all those burnt ferns
and reptiles, sharks and bony fish--

that was extinction on a scale that makes our losses
look like a bad day at the slots.

And perhaps we're slated to ascend to some kind of intelligence
that doesn't need bodies, or clean water,

even air. I talk to myself like a boy trying to get a girl
to go all the way. But just

when she's about to give in, her cell phone rings and she realizes, suddenly,
it's her best friend she's in love with.

Like h er, I can't shake my longing for the last six hundred
Iberian lynx, with their tufted ears,

Brazilian Guitarfish, the four percent of them still cruising
the seafloor, their eyesstaring straight up.

All the new-born marsupials, red kangaroo the size of honeybees,
steelhead trout, river dolphins, so many species

of frogs breathing through their damp permeable membranes,
I can't get them out of my mind.

Today on the bus, there's a woman in a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
and her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed

on her pale shoulder, makes me ache for those bright flashes in the snow.
And polar bears, the cream and amber

of their fur, the long, hollow hairs through which sun slips,
swallowed in their dark skin. When I get home,

my son has a headache, and though he's almost grown, asks me to sing.
We lie together on the lumpy couch

and I warble out the old show tunes, Some enchanted evening...
They can't take that away from me. A cheap

silver chain shimmers across his throat rising and falling with his pulse.
There never was anything else,

only these excruciatingly insignificant creatures we love.
And then I look up.

The sun has torn through the clouds and the apricot blossoms, startlingly
white against the bare gray branches, are lit

from within, so I want to be a painter, I want to run for my oily palette, rushing
out the door, to save something.