The dwarf hippopotamus, the golden toad

                     by Lucia Perillo

The Great Wave

              Life on this earth has often been distubed by dreadful events.

             -- George Cuvier, 1812

1.

Now that we've entered the sixth great wave of extinction

let's sing while we still can.

before we all go where the dinosaurs went,

dropping our bones down into the shale.

And the floor of the sea becomes the top

of the mountain, the top

of the mountain the trough of the ditch.

Quick.

climb onto my back and cry wreck it wreck it

like a frog in the grip of exctatic amplexus

. . . before the UVB exceeds the threshold

or the chytrid fungus destroys our skin

or trematodes further encyst in our limb buds

or the meteor hits and the Earth is once

more wrapped in a cloak of dust.

2.

Please accept my regret

for the frogs that I've eaten

but grant me the gig

with which I impaled them

and the words gig and impale

and especially the splashing through

the lake edge at night

searching for eyes!

There was too much to love about their deaths,

using the gig like a picador

stabbing the hump on the neck of the bull

so the darkness roared and threw down its roses!

At least, I felt its velvet petals on my cheeks.

3.

This year's Christmas trees are tainted

with Pacific chorus frogs

we're not supposed to let hop

out the door. But there's and easy solution:

all you need is a jar.

And the will to stick the jar in the freezer

then flush.

It's simple, it's clean.

No one's talking about a whale here

dead in the dooryard.

Or an auroch or a quagga.

4. Too late for the golden toads, who vanished

as soon as the scientists came to map out

their plots. Until it dawned on the scientists: they

were the vector. As in:

Look for me under your bootsoles.

You will hardly now who I am or what I mean,

But I shall filter and fiber your blood.

But in the village you can still buy

figurines, for luck -- golden toads

on cell phones and toads on mopeds and toads

who will serenade you with their mandolins.

5.

I don't have the ending: ask the Vegas Valley leopard frog.

The dwarf hippopotamus or the giant swan.

Stag-moose, shrub ox, passenger pigeon.

The golden coqui or the short-faced bear.

When we are gone, may some survivor

like Mr. Industrious Roach

evolve the brains to hawk our likenesses

for didn't we cherish commerce and

view fortune as a wheel? 

From The American Poetry Review, July/August 2014.