1
Let us explain, the church said, the mystery
Of the inexplicable bones.  One: God ran tests,
What did we think?  There’s always waste—to get
Eden right, He had to fail a thousand times,
All those bones the rejected prototypes
For paradise.  Two: God, for personal
Reasons, don’t ask, created fossils.  Wouldn’t
You use omniscience for deceit?  Wouldn’t
You test your people with the illusion
Of previous life?  Three: There were species
Too late for the ark, the animals at fault,
Indifferent to “All aboard.”  A pair
Of mammoths dawdled; the pterodactyls waffled;
Noah had enough to do with rationing,
With teaching the Peaceable Kingdom precepts.

2
Or Noah, we guessed, senses that ark too small.
Afraid to blame God for the stupid specs,
He discreetly left half the world behind.
On Sundays, we learned the revised standard
Version of his story from a flannel board.
We followed felt cutouts through Noah’s journey;
We heard reports on each Ararat attempt,
The church or celebrities funding those climbs
For the ark’s splinters on the favorite
Mountain of the faithful.  And we imagined
That cloth reshaped to everything preserved
By lava or tar whenever our teacher
Fast-forwarded to old Abraham and
The near-sacrifice he made following
The next audible orders from God.

3
The aurochs, quagga, great auk, and moa—
In the heresy of the backward glance,
An astonishment of passenger pigeons
Blackens the sky.  One bird, its eyes sewn shut,
Is tied by hunters to a stool.  And it calls
Loudly, of course, from the dark, drawing the flock
To the pogrom until nothing remains
But gangsters’ slang, how we’ve used the dodo,
Which posed for artists, stood still for butchers,
The intent of predators bred from its genes.
What lasts?  What Lasts?  A hundred years after
It disappeared, the flightless dodo turned
To hoax: Because there were no skeletons.
Because portrait art was weak evidence
Against the circumstantial disbelief.

4
The immediate doubt of the witness—
In each museum, we read to verify
The bones, even those with hides or feathers
Like Martha, the last passenger pigeon,
Who was caged in the Cincinnati Zoo,
Who died and was not buried and rose again
As exhibit a year after Moreschi,
The last castrato, retired.  The labels
On each of his ten recordings call him
The Soprano of the Sistine Chapel,
The church confessing to the altered truth
Of its soloists, inventing angels
We can visualize by listening
To the museum’s gramophone, rapt with hearing
The pure, unnatural voice of extinction.