We stand by the patch of grass marked his.
But he is no longer subject
to the whims of this bewildering sphere,
with its sound waves, cancers, specific gravity, spring,
where we still live, where ostrich chicks
before hatching sing through the eggshell,
where filarial worms in bloodstream darkness
know when it’s night, and drift to the skin
of their host, so mosquitoes
will drink them and bear them away.
Did he look without eyes
once more as if over his shoulder,
did his old home shrink
to a rolling marble?—
where elephants hollow out caves in a mountain
to eat its salt, where ants shelter aphids
and drink their sweet green milk,
where a black-tailed prairie dog bolts
through a tunnel with an infant head
and scarlet neck in its mouth.
We who still recoil from death,
how can we picture where he is now?—
when we labor to comprehend
this place, where minute crustaceans
pierce the side of a swordfish
to lodge in its heart, where spadefoot toads
wake from eleven months’ sleep and sing
till their throats bleed, where humans
do everything humans do, where a fig wasp
pollinates a flower while laying her eggs,
then lies on her side as baby nematodes
crawl from her half-eaten gut, and where faithfully
every day in mangrove shallows
paired seahorses— armless, legless, without expression—
dance with each other at sunrise.