You must know Darwin—not any darwin
in forums with telescopes on his eyes
always singing the beard like a puppet,
or one having his tag by accident;
I really mean the God of chance—
he respected me, no, he deified me
not because I once mirrored his incubation
when we sat alone on HMS Beagle,
but that I surpassed him in jest—
this, too, he dismissed when I reviewed
the Origin long before it absorbed us.
I had asked as throes gripped him,
what he would be after the time—
My friend, he called, there is no death
but transmutation, and we laughed at sophistry.
So, Darwin never died as you presume,
and not only he, but every extinct thing:
do not compose elegies for Tiktaalik roseae,
dinosaurs, Raphus cucullatus and golden toads
or remind me of Suyá and Ostrogoth,
St. Helena olives and Sri Lanka legumes—
they have, indeed, been transformed—I know
he would agree wherever whatever he is,
that the Holocene extinction is natural selection.
He knew I detest praising friends privately,
I sing them loud as a thrush
I laud public approval, which he adored,
and I told him in undressed words
that I did not share his lust
and how he swore in the name
of greed and in its night-birthed misnomers
we give all the things that limp
backwards into the beautiful door of love;
the stubble smiled and laughed at me,
yet he did not stir my head
to make differently how we should live.
I never meant, friend, to distract you,
to cut new pathways in your mind
to discredit or credit the new whiskers,
and believe me, I wonder every day
as I walk across shacks and skyscrapers
how many of us daily go extinct
by our fatal greed and inverse love
that wet the long lungs of death—
and which of us, Malthus, is next?
