Third Place Winner, October 2003 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, October 2003

THE LAST SEXUAL EXTINCTION
      Sean Farragher
      (Café Utne)

      [after] Gould, S.J., 1989. Wonderful Life:
      The Burgess Shale and the nature of history.
      W.W.Norton and Company: New York, p.1-347.
      ISBN 0-393-02705-8

Blood dries on my eye lids
closing off the entry and exit.
No one may find me. Perfection
rattles underneath the shed
and we call it a muskrat
and say there is extinction soon.
One can hear the slice of meat
and the undulations of the tunnel
where the tubes connect to Spring.

What does extinction mean the children ask?
No answers. Nothing.

The storm was petulant and wound through
silent cobalt tide grass caught by men and women
fucking; they slosh air to sleep in their own abode.
They kept breathing long after all the other phyla died.

This is the gift of faith
Ghosts survive in the corner of the coffin
left out to dry to be used again next war.

And as a litany we sing, almost without object, meaning
or that denied lie instinctive by birth,

“This mollusk is my brachiopod.
This trilobite is a lamb.

“This mollusk is my brachiopod.
This trilobite is a lamb.”

Person #1: There is no order to life, you know.

Person #2: Do you really think every chance has been taken?

Judge Wayne Miller’s comment: “‘The Last Sexual Extinction’ moves through issues of science, evolution, violence, and sexuality, yet does so in a disjunctive, dreamlike way. Though I find myself a little confused by the stanza’s first progression, the oddness of the lines keeps me engaged. And then the poem becomes more disjunctive from stanza to stanza. We see glimpses of sex—a virtual constant evolutionarily speaking—even as other species are dying all around. And then there’s human violence, as evoked by the wonderful image of ghosts surviving ‘in the corner of the coffin / left out to dry to be used again next war.’ Finally, we land in this strange claiming—and joining—of the present and the ancient, through the lines ‘This mollusk is my brachiopod. / This trilobite is a lamb.’ These lines seem to get at a desire to personalize mystery, and perhaps subtly hint at Christian myth. And then the end seems strange and right to me—two fully anonymous people pontificating on the unanswerable.”