Drive out past the misplaced rice paddies 

that love autumn burns and think they’re in China, 

past the slough where carp cruise 

their own rendition of Asia, except those Jet Skis 

obscure their vision. Go beyond the longest finger of Delta 

flipping the bird at the hazy sky 

particulate in the dawn of another blazing day— 

At the local flea market there’s a stall

which you won’t find without a map of this shutdown town 

whose name nobody remembers. 

It’s not that place where they sell copycat 
Pradas, LVs, and Kate Spades—people here don’t know 

fancy labels, would trash them anyway— 

Behind that corroded Suburban, see all the folding tables 

straining under salty, red rocks from Mars, 

jars of spilled crude from Exxon Valdez 

mixed with Captain Hazelwood’s farewell Yukon Jack. 

There are the bones preserved in lava of Harry R. Truman, 

eternal proprietor of Mount St. Helens Lodge 

alongside wholesale ash from his wife, fair Loowit. 

You’ll find depleted uranium sealed in tiny canisters 

from Farallon Islands resting by urns filled with water 

from the Mississippi cancer corridor, vials of rust 

from nails once bloodied with stigmata from Calvary, 

mostly crucified petty thieves. 

You’ll need to compete with crowds 

crushed around signs painted sloppily 

“Extirpated Families,” “Extinct Species” 

to see the miracles: 

the lined pocketbook (lampsilis binominata) 

by no means a wallet clam;

the passenger pigeon (with its own passenger mite), legendary 

for having unwittingly fed the poor and indentured. 

And a small fish named after a slave boat, 

the Amistad gambusia, known only to occur 

in Goodenough Spring (pronounced good enough), a tributary 

buried under sludge near the Rio Grande. 

All these creatures on the verge 

of rebirth.