Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame

Katie Willingham

I'm often sorry about wanting to catch you when you're down

          but other days I fake it. My work

requires some level of regret I can't muster consistently.

It rains. I open my heart enough to let a moth fly in,

          then trap it. I'm sorry to say that's how poems are made. One eye

on each wing, this whole-body blinking.

All of this makes sense as long as you keep yourself from thinking about it.

          Not an elephant. Not an oil crisis.

Until yesterday, several vials of smallpox remained

          unaccounted for, resting benevolent in a cardboard box

in an unused storage area of a research center in Bethesda.

          Concerning the accounted-for vials, those too

have yet to be destroyed by the United States

          or Russia.

It's easy to dream myself in a cardboard box. I'm

          very good at holding my breath.

But how can you not harbor doubts? Economist

         Morris Adelman died last month, his famous line—We will never run out

of oil. Or smallpox, as it happens.

As it happens, I go into the sunroom to water the jade, the child

          of my grandmother's plant which was cut

from her nurse's plant which was cut from her

          ex-husband's plant. I'm getting to the part where

I run out of things to say about extinction. Cut a branch

          and bury it. Sometimes

I'm sorry these plants take such little care, such

          little work required of me.