Towards selection

The second time it became extinct, Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica
            lasted seven minutes: a weak-lunged clone
            grown in a goat: rotten copy of Celia,
            who went the first time under a falling tree.
I don’t know how to have lost what
            comes
back, what we should say for the passed
            that we repeat
            like a word revived to be the name
            of a yacht or a drink.

I spent an afternoon coppicing in a small, still wood kept
            agitated by roads
with those lovely despairing grey-haired women who
            have come on their own
            to cut brambles back or walk the course
of dried-up rivers, who feel the other
world falling away, picking needles
            from the canal. Who replant,
            who still sign petitions,
so otters are common beside farmland again,
some road construction on hold.            
They drank elderflower cordial and I left my Sprite unopened
            in my bag until
            I got home.

The giving and the taking away not a possible
            sum. Before the
            anthropocene: a mass of
            failures, unauthored revisions in search of
            uses, but variety
always better than dullness is the best I can keep
            caring about deletions
with, and I
do. Same sickly Celias scattered across the crags
            mingling with goats seems
            less dull than them nowhere
            at all.

The women remind the larvae in the bark
            of their Latin name
            as they chop willow to the base to grow
again, as if
something definite
            will live
            regardless
            of them.

Freewheeling, I

set off a flock
            of starlings from
a roadside tree:
            a mess
of falling pieces
            that confuse
the road enclose
            another tree:
a same new
            form: a kind
of birth I break
            it soon enough
arriving off
            they go
                        from tree
            to tree
                        to tree
until the road is out of trees.