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
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
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.