after E. O. Wilson
We know you haven’t been trying to hide,
but good job on making yourself scarce
as the Anthropocene raged overhead,
your burrow in the loam of a rain forest safe
until just this year when it was cleared for cattle,
you cleared too, bulldozed into piles, burned
before we could show up, make field notes,
name you after some minor god or colleague.
Or maybe you’re still out there, a sea slug perhaps,
blind and anerobic yet cozy in an ocean fissure,
warmed by leaking magma, safe from our kind
since we cannot (yet) harm our molten core.
There are limits to our follies, never mind the ninety
bags of excrement we decided to leave on the moon —
fair warning to any extra-galactic scholars who might
come to sketch and classify us, except after finding
those frozen bags of poo on our one bequeathed moon,
they thought better of observing such savages, they left
our page in their Big Book blank, we the unnamed life.
—
Rupert Fike’s second collection of poems, Hello the House (Snake Nation Press) was named as one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read, 2018” by the Georgia Center for the Book. His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Poetry Review, The Sun, The Main Street Rag, Kestrel, Scalawag Magazine, The Georgetown Review, A&U America’s AIDS Magazine, The Flannery O’Connor Review, Duende, The Buddhist Poetry Review, Natural Bridge and others.
