This is how it starts.
Out of the seeming
dead branch, the green hands
of the mountain mahogany
overnight, about to flex.

There has been a lot of talk
lately about extinction,
and there will be some:
there always was, I guess, before anything
much cared about comings and goings.
It is only this that makes it hurt:
the deep quiet of a Colorado morning,
the sky cerulean, cupped blue
as though we were seeing it
from inside the egg of that migratory thrush,
our new feathers — you could hardly call them that —
new skin, bones, beak, near formless

and the scrim of the earth,
all it means, outside the glowing shell.

But instead, we must somehow be
in the other hemisphere:
not this northern Easter but in mid fall,
the stars all different,
the dry seed, like the corkscrew style
of the mahogany — a few stragglers stuck
among the small green hands — the rest
long since picked up, blown off and out
to other work.