Jesse's Farm

We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a

generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then

stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval

between a mother and her child — not enough for refuge in numerics,

reckoning we’ll be old or gone. Her in my rear-view mirror when I skew

it. Undoing velcro:  velours crochet — the maker plucked burrs from

his sweater, studied them under a microscope. There’s a microscope

I inherited, embedded in a fake snakeskin case. Ravaged scales,

surges of herring with x’s for eyes; already they’re cartoons — I can’t

pretend because of her I should at least imagine them, the beaches I

have known, putrid at low tide or maybe a dreadful, birdless quiet —

but also I keep driving through commercial outskirts, dimly reading

blowout signs. Her chirped naming: excebator, earplane, cloud.

We’re going to Jesse’s farm, which resembles the farms in our picture

books. Ducklings hasten after lambs, pigs root in coffee-ground soil.

Fences are makeshift there. Being from life, it isn’t bloodless. A sow

with a taste for chicks. The peacock, ornate as a cabaret, reigning from

the coop roof, lunging at what moves. Almost there — words half

sung, but even my breast milk has an undertow.

So we’re driving. Not with sirens. To the farm that resembles a

refuge. Siren is the genus of a salamander eel. Sirenia, the order of

the placid, grazing manatee. If I spoon-feed her the beloved world

enough, is it?

Ravaged tides to picture. It isn’t bloodless. Mirror, daughter, what

will I wish that I did?

Which isn’t what I say. Hello old farm-gates, hello cedars.

Here we are.