☀ What Sparks Poetry: Claire Wahmanholm on "Deathbed Dream with Extinction List"

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May 1, 2023

What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.

Deathbed Dream with Extinction List

Claire Wahmanholm

Lately, my dreams have been more dead
than usual. They have always been a little dead,
but only around the edges. Or the deadness
has been a dimple on the dreamscape:
a little sweet, a little fermented, a little vegetal.
Appalachian yellow asphodel, the dream says,
and its sunny stars shine, exuberant and dead
and loudly so. The bluebuck lowers its blue face
into them. The cryptic treehunter carries
a dwarf mantis orangely into a tree. Because
the dream is so dead, there is no difference
between the land and the sea. The eelgrass limpet
could easily be mistaken for a mountain pebble,
the forkshell for a shelf fungus. Because the dream
is so dead, there is no difference between moss
and my breath. The golden toad clambers across
the cloud forest of my face. I have followed
the speckled trail of Himalayan quail feathers
and now I am on a beach that is also a mountain
that is also, somehow, the scrubby backyard
of my childhood home. The Indefatigable
Galápagos mouse is here, which seems unlikely
as anything. I hadn’t thought to see the Japanese sea lion
again, or for the first time. I’ve heard that most people die
within one day of having a dream like this, in which
I am packing my suitcase full of Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō mating calls.
In the forested canyons of being dead, they can
finally be answered. Most people die within a day
of waking from this dream, but if life on Earth
were a day, we have only been awake for one minute
and fifteen seconds of it. Long enough to erase
the large sloth lemur and the Mariana mallard
and eighty-three percent of everything else.
On balance, it’s unnatural to be living. A statistical
impossibility. Extinct means extinguish means quench,
but what mouth is so thirsty for our deadness?
What could hold the Navassa curly-tailed lizard
as it curls its tail in alarm? What could hold
ten million species? The Old English bulldog,
for example, or the aquarium full of phantom shiners
gleaming like the northern lights. It is already
flamboyantly night. The space between the stars
is startlesome as the eyes of the Queen of Sheba’s gazelle.
I recognize the Rodrigues night heron by its unwary
amble. I too had thought myself unassailable,
buoyant with time. O night soft as sea mink,
everything’s going to be fine. O Tasmanian tiger,
not even one hundred years gone. What kind of sponge
is this dream, that it can soak up so much time?
What happens when it’s squeezed? My knees have become
upland for the upland moa. My hips are mottled
by the Vegas Valley leopard frog. I don’t know
how an entire forest has sprouted inside my lungs,
but I have been cooperative, and the leaves
of the woolly-stalked begonia have been so gentle.
My cells rumble beneath the plod of the Xenoceratops,
which honestly seems too big to have vanished.
My heart is itchy. I would like to place it in a cooler body.
I would like to place it in a den of Yunnan lake newts
and let their red spines outshine my blood,
though everything is already shining from the edges
in and closing the doors behind it. There has been
some confusion. I meant for the dream to end,
but not while I was inside it. I have mistaken
the dream’s deadness for my own skin, my breathing
for the shaky song of the Zulu ambush katydid.

from the book MELTWATER / Milkweed Editions

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What Sparks Poetry:
Claire Wahmanholm on "Deathbed Dream with Extinction List"
"I love writing abecedarians. I love that they make me reach for words I would not ordinarily reach for; I love that they gesture at abundance without exhausting it, that they leave more unsaid than said. I love that they open the doors of my existing knowledge and invite me into the dictionary, the thesaurus, the encyclopedia, any number of archives. I love how democratic they are: even the trickiest, least common letter must be used, and the heavy hitters may only appear once."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

"How I Became a Rat"
Poet and publisher Joyelle McSweeney delves into Kim Hyesoon's "unruly poetics." "A diction inside an interdiction. A paradoxical expansion inside the constriction of the patriarch, the army-man, the violent state censor. Anyone who has read or shared Kim Hyesoon's work feels the charge of this emergence, carried through that cosmic zone of black wind, black hair."
via POETRY FOUNDATION

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