The Big Picture

I try to look at the big picture.
The sun, ardent tongue
licking us like a mother besotted

with her new cub, will wear itself out.
Everything is transitory.
I think about the meteor

that decimated the dinosaurs.
And before that, the volcanoes
of the Permian period—all those burnt ferns

and reptiles, sharks and bony fish—
that was extinction on a scale
that makes our losses look like a bad day at the slots.

And perhaps we’re slated to ascend
to some kind of intelligence
that doesn’t need bodies, or clean water, even air.

But I can’t shake my longing
for the last six hundred
Iberian lynx with their tufted ears,

Brazilian Guitarfish, the four
percent of them still cruising
the seafloor, eyes staring straight up.

And all the new-born marsupials, red kangaroo
the size of honeybees, steelhead trout,
river dolphins, so many species

of frogs breathing through their damp
permeable membranes,
I can’t get them out of my mind.

Today on the bus, a woman
in a sweater the exact shade of cardinals,
and her cardinal-colored bra strap, exposed

on her pale shoulder, makes me ache
for those bright flashes in the snow.
And polar bears, the cream and amber

of their fur, the long, hollow
hairs through which sun slips,
swallowed into their dark skin. When I get home,

my son has a headache, and though he’s
almost grown, asks me to sing him a song.
We lie together on the lumpy couch

and I warble out the old show tunes, Night and Day…
They Can’t Take That Away from Me…A cheap
silver chain shimmers across his throat

rising and falling with his pulse. There never was
anything else. Only these excruciatingly
insignificant creatures we love.

*Ellen Bass' most recent book of poetry, Mules of Love, was published by BOA Editions and is the winner of the 2002 Lambda Literary Award for Poetry. Ellen co-edited the groundbreaking book, No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women and has published four previous volumes of poetry, I’m Not Your Laughing Daughter, Of Separateness and Merging, For Earthly Survival, and Our Stunning Harvest. In 2007 her next book of poetry, The Human Line, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.