On September 1, 1914 at 1:00 p.m.
At the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens
The world's last passenger pigeon died

Once we were
Stacked up tier on tier, days high
Blocking the sun like a billion-beaked
Armageddon: Billions!
Truths now sheltered
Under one pair of wings.
Better to be caged.
There's some dead dignity in that,
A museum awaiting a stuffed package
Of feathers and sand
Labeled passenger pigeon.
We had our own name.
You'd like to know it,
But if we can no longer have the sky
Or even the cage
We can at least have
A secret.

 originally appeared in Exit 13 magazine, winter 2000

A nameless nomad in the ruin of the world,
I'd come to the river to drown--
But she had gotten there first,
channeling the water away
with a clever arrangement of
woven rushes and mud-cemented rock.
Nature tricked, she scoured the bottom
for water-smoothed stones
her broom-straw hair in a banana-leaf weave.
Tile for a table, she said.
The goddess of the domestic hearth
was now Earth mom in a stripped birch corset,
slaving for the sins of that uncivilized sort
who had jabbed thorny missiles in the garden.
She laid that miracle table out,
shaping as she went
(using a beaver tooth obtained through unladylike dedication)
'til the puzzle was solved.
She served a rabbit arrangement
and a salad of watercress and hikima
wondrous but for the eating.
After a day of foraging
her hair was pine and sap
her body shelves and alcoves
drawers rattling with trinkets
echoing with tiny-step staircases
all the functions of home
with none of the comforts.
Even now, a thousand poached grapefruits later
I can see her clear as through polished agate
hunched and tireless,
raising the prissy stanchions
of a better-ordered world
polished stone by polished stone.

originally appeared in  the Nov.-Dec. 1996 Conservative Review