"Massive dying off."
"When the fish began their dying, you didn't worry.
You bought new shoes.
They looked like crocodiles, snappy and rich,
brown as delta mud.
Even the box they shipped in was beautiful, bejeweled.
You tore through masses of swaddling paper.
These shoes, carefully cradled and all that cardboard
by what you now understand must have
been someone's tiny indifferent hands.
The five fingered sea stars you heard about on NPR.
You must have been driving to Costco.
It must have been before all the visitors arrived.
You needed covers, pillows, disposable containers.
At Costco, everything comes cheap.
Sea stars, jellies, anemones, all the scuddlers,
and hovers, and clingers, along the ocean floor.
'A massive dying off further displacing depleted
oxygen,' cried the radio announcer.
You plugged in your iPod.
Enough talk, you'd found the song
you had been searching for.
One cargo ship going out, one cargo ship coming in.
Crabs crawling up trawler lines.
Giant lobsters walking right onto the shore.
You've been sitting in your car watching
the sunset over the Golden Gate, NPR again.
One cargo ship going out, one cargo ship coming in.
Those who can, are leaving.
The Marin Headlands crouched toward the ocean,
fog so thick on their side of the bay you can't
tell crag from cloud from sea.
One cargo ship headed out, another coming in.
They're looking for a place where they can breathe.
You've been here less than an hour.
When the sun has finished setting, you'll go home.
In the dream your father is the last refuse to wash ashore.
This wasn't what you wanted, any of you.
The first sign of trouble was the bottle with the message.
That washed up years ago.
Then so many bottles, the stenographers
couldn't answer all the messages anymore.
The women of the village wept when your father died,
then they lined up to deliver tear-stained tissue
to the Secretary of the Interior,
who translated their meaning and had it writ out on a scroll.
These were the answers your people had been waiting for.
That papyrus wound around your father like a bandage.
The occasion announced you prayed
proper prayers, loaded him onto an outrigger, set him off.
But here he is again, stinking, swelling.
You can't dispose of the rising dead, and you're worried.
What can you do?"