Endangered Species by Dan Beachy-Quick

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 25, 2016   Endangered Species   Dan Beachy-Quick

Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my   life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time’s underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving’s underside. No one seeing the roots can guess   at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not   name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I’m still breathing. So empty I know I’m not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse—no one takes notes—disappear, &            Copyright © 2016 Dan Beachy-Quick. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Most immediately, ‘Endangered Species’ responds to the gradual disappearance of a number of butterfly species, most notably the monarch. But in more abstract ways, the poem tries to work within that oldest sense of reciprocity, wherein what damage occurs in the world, also occurs within those considering it, and that realm of thought and idea, so easily assumed to be caught in ideals and so free from actual diminishment, is also diminished—as the world is what one thinks about, and to lose it, is also to witness the loss of the mind.” —Dan Beachy-Quick   Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015). He teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Poetry by Beachy-Quick   gentlessness (Tupelo Press, 2015) "from 'Origin'" by Samantha Giles "Two Butterflies went out at Noon— (533)" by Emily Dickinson "Mostly Read The Luna Moth" by Jordan Davis Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038