By John James

For Wendell

 

Algae pushes north  and further north.   The plankton follows,   and with it, a biome     of multifarious   sea creatures: microbes,   mollusks. Charismatic   megafauna. All of them     now breed at higher latitude,  which means the things   that bred at that higher latitude   now breed elsewhere    and elsewhere  eat. I linger at the end,  the edge of it. I tread   the precipice     of the abyss. It is Friday,   early, and my son   is newly born. In the dark  he coos and grunts. The slowing     stream of morning   news murmurs in his ear.   It cradles him   in a sound, like some     object of history.   Outside, berry brambles   glisten in an almost   absent wind, here   

 

and there starting up  

 to toss pollen from a node. 
 The starlings, always   starlings, tighten    like fists along a strand   of telephone wire.    My son, he’s sucking   on my finger. He’s looking     up at me with two bulbous  slate gray eyes that hardly   let me scrawl these words.   I think of the beluga    whale stitched on his shirt, the fishy  taste of the milk it feeds   its own young, born in warmer   waters, which push them     toward the pole. Here, sun   pummels the windows   and the exposed planks of the house,   summons tiny seedlings    from the mud. It desiccates   the herbs left hanging   on the porch. My son   writhes in my arm, a single     muscle almost, slacking   and contracting as he throws   another wail. The end, it’s moving   toward us. His future’s set    in an unreadable script.   Through glass  I watch starlings shuffle   and depart, displace   

 

grubworms from the dirt.  

 My neighbor shaves  
 a bristlecone pine toppled  in the morning heat. He drops     the limbs in piles   and soaks the wood in flame.   Somewhere in the distance  plankton colonies dissolve.     Whales go with them.   The oak trees   burn in Spain. My son   rolls his eyes over curtains    and patterned sheets, gazes   at the azure  light of the TV. At his lips,   a milky bubble. He moves     his tiny head. He dozes   to the changeless whir   of the machine, gogging, I presume,   at its slow and secret ministry.     John James, who teaches creative writing at Bellarmine, is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring, 2022). His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. This poem, "Lullaby," received the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize, issued by the Academy of American Poets. James is completing his Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley.