Bestiary for the End Times

Lake Erie at Twilight, or the Last of the Blue Pike (Ontario, Canada)
 
Somehow the pink of the sky, the black geese
the aspirin glow
somehow the windmills
 
shredding the dusk to ribbons
across the breathing lake
across the soft swift toxic rippling
 
somehow the half-moon
fuzzy, yellow, stained
an earwax blot behind the satin clouds
 
somehow the rusted out carcasses
of walleye, bass and crappies scent the evening,
their fish people having yesterday alighted for colder waters
 
the blue pike gone these fifty years
her spiked dorsal standing ghost-like
at the lake’s old shore
 
gone too the Erie people
centuries gone, wiped out like beaver
by the beaver war
 
sudden explosions scatter the geese
their raucous music drifting off, pitch black
beneath the whisper of darkness
 
their somehow glow
their quiet murmuring
their thin paper silhouettes