TR Poulson
Dairy Farmer’s Daughter Considers Climate Change

Someday I fear it's too late, when jellyfish rule
oceans cleansed of blue-green algae. Turbines
stand unspinning, dusty, as those tradewinds
shift north and north again. Up at the Pole,
travelers tango on cruise ships. In the full
moonlight, shadows fall on bears' white hides.
Freshened water crosses Erie's sun-dried
bed in pipes. Divers glide through high schools
in Foster City. Workers build a Lagrange
Point Shade. Truckers wait at hubs of slaughter
for methane-burping milk cows, hushed and slain.
I want to take my dark-eyed Jersey heifer
to Alaska, hide with her near abandoned
fields of oil, let her raise her first calf, alone.

God, in the Cretaceous

Good, but far from very good,
He dubs them prototypes: the triceratops
and lobsters, the pterosaurs, the devil frogs,
plesiosaurs and crazy crabs. The burrowing
lizards. It's the lizard that stops Him.
He rubs the mud from His hands, picks
the sea salt from His fingernails,
before cupping the common ancestor
of many modern lizards in his palm.
Behold. A beautiful creature. So quick,
so simple, so potentially grand.

He can't put His finger
on why he likes this prototype.
The nimble neck? The long tapering
tail? The dainty legs? The legs must go!
He laughs at the image of the lizard
floundering on boulders without them.
He works through the eons-
the daylight twisting through fog,
the moons waning to a sliver-and more
prototypes appear, along with remains
left as fossils, before He lines the ribs
and vertebrae along a ledge, encloses
a heart, and binds them with sinews,
with skin. Behold: the prototype
for the python, the thread snake,
the saw-scaled viper. Some will return
to the sea, and some will hide
beneath rocks. Some will rattle,
and one will curl its body
around the tree.

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