CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY Vertebrate Orders The wind will carry the ash to Montana, to Bhutan, to the Ashaninka in Peru who had nothing to do with this. They’ll look up from their masato and find their children dying. Their heritage will lie open, like a hut left in a cucumber garden, like a skeleton scoured by army ants, and it will never be filled. The mechanism —how do you approach it? It has less life than an earwig, that looks up at you when you turn the light on. Yet somehow when we woke it up it was immortal. Not like an earwig, that you can reach out with your hand and crush, but immortal. Plastic has nothing to do with it, though it’s the special kind that lasts until the supernova. Plastic can be melted or picked off. The little wires can be taken up and put in jail. The drawings and diagrams could be burned at stakes. Yet it would still be there, the button, now that it’s awake. How do you kill a thought? We hated Koko because he was ourselves. But we have a thought too, and it can’t be killed either. There was a man with an ice pick. We had to forgive him. We’ve done horrible things ourselves, in dreams. But there are men with keyboards we can’t walk away from. These are harder. We can only forgive their pasts. We can only put them out of the way and rise up, and only because we have to. But we don’t have to unless we feel like it, so we might not. Climb up to the roof on a Saturday evening. A bell’s ringing. The rain’s falling. The starlings are talking in the oak. There are no colors to the south. A big building blocks the sunset. The only red is poppies in a window. But you don’t need much color. You have your whole imagination. You see through it now, whatever’s there. And the world suddenly looks perfect. You want to keep it that way. You want to live in it all your life. But you don’t need much color. You have your whole imagination. You see through it now, whatever’s there, and how it could be. And the world suddenly looks perfect. You want to keep it that way. You want to live in it all your life. I went to a hospital for people scared of war. The first therapy was pets. Puppies, kittens, long-haired rabbits, we each chose one we liked. We had to name it what we most feared. Cuddling Mutations in my lap, I got more used to the idea. Extinction of the Vertebrate Orders licked my ears and made me laugh. After all, they taught us, there’s nothing we can do about it. Why oversimplify matters? Rise above things. And their motto was: as long as you’re alive, you’re not dead. Live for the moment, then, is that it? You try, you try to. If the sun would shine it might be easier. But light reminds you of the last summer. Those were days of coltsfoot and ospreys. You could sit on the edge of Spirit Lake and think of it as hammered gold, because it would always be there. The three minutes passed like plague ships through our harbor. They didn’t stop, but not because we saw them. We neither saw them nor waved them off. A person looks at something. You’d think he’d do it with his eyes open. So we were wrong about Spirit Lake. We’ll have to make a readjustment. That’s not the trouble. It’s just that there’s a kind of smoke over everything we look at. It drifts around and takes the shape of anything we look at. It makes the whole world look like smoke. There’s a sound like a subdued crackle. The scattering crows become ashes. It’s just that the future is part of the moment. Then I’m going up into the mountains, and never coming back. Somebody has to watch out for the species. The chemist had the right idea. He used to build bombs in his basement, until he found a woman. Where did he take her? To the center of Montana. Far from the power plants, they’ve bought themselves guns. Let there be high walls to keep out the losers, and locks, and continual watching. We’ve already got the books to tell us how. For the rest, there’s a kind of underground vault. But they’d better save up enough air. 13
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