12-23-2014
Camille Dungy
A Massive Dying Off
​
When the fish began their dying you didn’t worry.
You bought new shoes.
They looked like crocodiles:
snappy and rich,
brown as delta mud.
Even the box they shipped in was beautiful, bejeweled.
You tore through masses of swaddling paper,
these shoes!
carefully cradled
in all that cardboard by what
you now understand
must have been someone’s tiny, indifferent hands.
*
The five-fingered sea stars you heard about on NPR.
You must have been driving to Costco.
It must have been before all the visitors arrived.
You needed covers, pillows, disposable containers.
At Costco, everything comes cheap.
Sea stars, jellies, anemones, all the scuttlers and hoverers
and clingers along the ocean floor. A massive dying off, further displacing
depleted oxygen, cried the radio announcer.
You plugged in your iPod.
Enough talk. You’d found the song you had been searching for.
*
One cargo ship going out. One cargo ship coming in.
Crabs crawling up trawler lines.
Giant lobsters walking
right onto the shore.
You’ve been sitting in your car
watching the sunset over the Golden Gate.
NPR again.
One cargo ship going out. One cargo ship coming in.
Those who can are leaving.
The Marin Headlands crouch
toward the ocean,
fog so thick on their side of the bay
you can’t tell crag from cloud from sea.
One cargo ship headed out, another coming in.
They’re looking for a place
where they can breath.
You’ve been here less than an hour.
When the sun has finished setting
you’ll go home.
*
In the dream, your father is the last refuse to wash ashore.
This wasn’t what you wanted.
Any of you.
The first sign
of trouble was the bottle with the message.
That washed up years ago.
Then, so many bottles
the stenographers couldn’t answer all the messages anymore.
The women of the village wept when your father died.
Then they lined up to deliver tear-stained tissue to the secretary of the interior
who translated their meaning
and had it writ out on a scroll.
These were the answers your people had been waiting for!
That papyrus wound around your father like a bandage.
The occasion announced,
you prayed proper prayers, loaded him onto an outrigger,
set him off,
but here he is again. Stinking.
Swelling.
You can’t dispose of the rising dead and you’re worried.
What can you do?
​
-from Smith Blue--celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
I am rarely, more likely never, reaching for a statement in poetry. That I might arrive at a statement in poetry upon the successful completion of a poem is fine with me. But if I am reaching at the outset of a poem for a statement I am significantly more likely to create propaganda than poetry.
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Camille T. Dungy was born and raised in the western United States (Colorado and California), though she has lived briefly in most other regions of the U.S. and has spent time on all but one continent and several countries. Dungy attributes some of the energy in her writing to both her delight in going new places and meeting new people and the good fortune of having a beautiful place to root down and call home. In much of her writing, Dungy considers history, landscape, culture, family, and desire. Her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden was published by Simon and Schuster in 2023. Dungy is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and A Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton &Co: 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.
