by Kim Goldberg

Somewhere beyond silent streets

and woodlands, beyond upheaved

graveyards, empty schools, dry spillways, vacant

hibernaculums for little brown bats

beyond the last larval foodplant for the last

western tiger swallowtail

an old woman sits by the sea untangling

the nets of each life she can imagine.

Her cabin above the tideline is filled with books

from the Time Before but little else.

She cooks over a burn barrel beside her shack

stokes it with driftwood and whatever tumbles

ashore. Once an old door made a landing

then a desk still intact. She grills any scrap of flesh

the sea hacks up—bull kelp, moon

jellies, three-eyed eels. Eats them with succulent

stems of glasswort growing in the sand.

When evening comes, she flings each newly

sorted net upon the ocean like a bedsheet

for each is a piece of the planetary genome.

She is waiting for the nets to find

one another, reconnect end-to-end, spiral

beneath the waves. Replicate.

But each net returns alone, an enfolded mass

of knots, bone, chitinous exoskeletons, bloated

elongate bodies of the unknown.

 

Written June 2, 2017, the morning after US President Donald Trump announced he was pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Kim Goldberg is the author of seven books of poetry and nonfiction. She lives close to the sea in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where she wanders, wonders, and watches birds.

 

This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.

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