On its birthday there were six billion of it,
pre-animal, pre-vegetable bacteria,
a patch on a young planet,
steadily harvesting water.
Good water, good water, good, good enough,
then too bad. The old story, written here
as a kind of stripe, a kind of bump in stone.
Once, uncounted bushels of jellyfish
(once, and more than once) washed up
on sand above a receding ocean—
armless, heartless, transparent lenses,
giving up to the sun with their substance
half a mile of extravagant shining
that no one saw but seagulls,
half an hour of bright litter before
they dried into wrinkled membrane.
Four left fossil shadows.
Upon the wind-scoured plain, behold,
as proof that grass was here before,
grass, which will provide, as future
evidence of its existence, grass.
Dear Sir or Madam: Enclosed please find
a persistent tactile memory—
the squashy heft of smoked meat wrapped in foil
to take on the plane from my father
(lethal cells in him maybe already building)
to my sweet carnivorous husband.
Best I ever ate, he said.
From the implicated, carcinogenic grill.
I have about six billion fragments like that;
should I throw them in the river? It’s full
of salmon shoving upstream to breed and die,
not one of them saying
remember, remember me.