Let’s all write wordless books
and scroll through them page by page
marking the age of anxiety blissfully
over. Let’s all read each other’s blank
verse and search elusive forbearance
in angels disguised as hipsters
and crows. Let’s all imagine worlds
made feverish, galaxies racing away
in the night, gods not dead but indifferent
as dead whales sinking to the ocean’s
lightless crushed depths, food for other
lightless creatures marvelous in their own
thoughtlessness. What remains in this
hushed deep? We eat: we are eaten.
God’s carcass bristling with worms,
toothless hagfish worrying morsels
from vertebral moorings, banquets of
barnacled flesh made into holy sulfur.
Let’s pray a community feast beyond
our ken, pray indifferent gods and
divine whales, pray wordless corpses
sunk in dark oceans, pray the deep,
the sightless, ancient scuttling toward
fragrant death, pray ripped flesh and
bone-bored proclamations of lipid-
soaked sediment, a come-hither
of such power gods themselves—
craven ratfish, abyssal snot flower—
quietly feed with blesséd creatures
who will never know angels and
care not for words:
Rubyspira, rasping eater of bone dust.
Vrijenhoekia, meagre bristle worm.
Osedax, excreter of acids, keeper of
microscopic males.
—
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. His essays and poems appear in Sky Island Journal, High Country News, The AutoEthnographer, and elsewhere.
