Grasp
       

1.
Ingrid's husband Jon who is a scientist
mentioned that whales have vestigial thumbs.
Jon, I said, I think it's hip bones. (It worries me
when scientists are confused like this.)
Together we looked it up. It's vestigial hip bones that whales have—
though whales do have bones in their pectoral fins that resemble thumbs
but scientists (whale scientists) hypothesize these whale fins
evolved from forelimbs, probably forelimbs of
a prehistoric carnivorous rodent, likely rather large.
It's sad, really.
            What we've become.
            What change will do and keep us from.

2.
This morning in the news
there was a story about birds dropping dead
from the sky due to wildfire smoke or unprecedented heat
their insubstantial feathered bodies
breast-up and leg-curled along trails in the New Mexico wilderness, and
something inside me has unstuck.
Something floats helpless—
            vestigial limb, superfluous bone
            disconnected from the other bones.

3.
I use my thumbs to flip through magazines
seeking something vanished: a perfumed youth,
photographed eye that glances at the shadows of sunlight in the tree,
something that rises in the salt brine
of my chest, cheek-wet with desire.

4.
I saw a Dusky Flycatcher today: looking at the ashes of the fire.
Chance, luck, change, disaster. A baby whale
being born, tail first. A warbler in the branches
of a hedge, that tiny hip
of the whale
vestigial and suspended in its mass of whale flesh—
a pale arrow shape suspended
in the twinkle lights of whale spine, a remnant
for remembering that afternoon—
the dry grass, the heat, the underbrush,
the pelvic bone, the femoral head, the
love made in the dust.

6.
If whales desire, their desire is profound,
a cavernous inhale at the horizon's trough.
Imagine this: a single whale, the last surviving one—
sunk into its blue and solitary hollow.
            The cry that whale makes.
            And think of this: a vestigial ear
            that hears that whale cry.
They never learned to hold.
They only let things go.

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Copyright © 2022 Lisa Allen Ortiz All rights reserved
from Connecticut River Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission