Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame
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.
Copyright Credit: Katie Willingham, "Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame" from Unlikely Designs. Copyright © 2017 by Katie Willingham. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
Source: Unlikely Designs (The University of Chicago Press, 2017)