from Ars Poeticas
There was once a prairie.
It's never coming back,
as in it will never be whole again.
There's the bison.
They can come back.
But the bison plus the prairie,
as in the bison moving over the prairie
with the rumored speed of a race horse,
that too is never coming back
until we change the well-intentioned
hopes of institutions of research,
the less well-intentioned grants
for rewilding from banks and governments,
into something psychotic and large
in its demands,
by which I mean the end of capitalism.
Really, I don't want to land this poem so hard,
land it on a word so cliched as "capitalism,"
but I don't know how to say otherwise
about this predicament we are in
where there is only one way out.
That it's an idea that feels impossible
to include in a poem tells us something
about the new fears of imagining we
have yet to embrace.
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Ars Poeticas
Wesleyan University Press
2025
