Poetry / Jennifer Handy

:: Reading the Wikipedia Entry on Extinction ::

	
Sitting in an old VW, a fossilized vehicle, resurrected 
like a Lazarus species. Perched between rocks and God.   

Thomas Jefferson opposed the concept of extinction
on the grounds that it would leave a gap in the Great Chain of Being 
somewhere between God and rocks.

He insisted the woolly mammoth still stomped around somewhere. 
I would like to believe in that kind of world. A world of mammoth
kindness, where no amount of violence could utterly destroy
an entire species. Where the gap between the living
and the dead was smaller, less a canyon, more like a foxhole.
Where I could, in my travels, expect to encounter the spotted wings 
of a passenger pigeon, if not the down-crooked beak of a Mauritian dodo.  

Before I left Contra Costa County, small branched pink flowers 
made local news. The Mt. Diablo buckwheat reclaimed its historic territory 
along with its status among the living. I fled for the same reason
as the flowers: the Home Depots, too much beige paint, 
the suburban stink of over-pavement. 

In the stones and stillness of the desert, I read about habitat destruction, 
urban sprawl, adaptive landscapes. Nearby are three saguaros. 
The zebra-tailed lizard, a familiar companion.  A brief flutter.
The striped wings of a ferruginous pygmy owl. 

Do they know they too are in Wikipedia?  
I move on to viruses and planned extinction.
Endlings and empty forests.  Genocide.    

The zebra-tailed lizard catches a small beetle. Glances in my direction.  
Does lizard push-ups. Ecstatic at being alive.   

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem has its roots in a recent six-year peri­od I spent camp­ing and liv­ing out­doors in some of the most remote regions of the west­ern Unit­ed States, includ­ing more than two years in the Sono­ran Desert. The imagery of the desert, seared into my body over two con­sec­u­tive sum­mers with­out air con­di­tion­ing, has stayed with me and remains more vis­i­ble and present than my cur­rent sur­round­ings in Iowa.

As an envi­ron­men­tal writer, I draw upon these expe­ri­ences to show human rela­tion­ships unfold­ing against a back­drop of the nat­ur­al world, which is our home in the truest sense of the word. The ety­mol­o­gy of home focus­es on the idea of set­tling or dwelling in a par­tic­u­lar place, which is ulti­mate­ly locat­ed in the land and on the earth, no mat­ter how much we try to dis­con­nect from that real­i­ty and sur­round our­selves with tech­nol­o­gy and bureau­cra­cy and plas­tics. My poet­ics seeks to dis­rupt the dom­i­nant anthro­pocen­tric world­view and to locate dis­cus­sions of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, love, sex, and the body with­in spe­cif­ic ecosys­tems rather than see­ing them as unique­ly human expe­ri­ences, which they are not.