It’s the small ones that disappear first: 
lavender butterflies that once freckled

the greasewood brush, delicate thistles whose ghosts 
still sting.  Then, we lost what we can gather

with our hands: the kangaroo rat, the white splittail. 
Hardly even a meal in that tiny body, but we were hungry 

for the dull stare of an empty lake void of any life. 
We are the algae that comes, after.  The green idea 

of want and need.  Then, when we settled down 
into Missions and tilled the land, what we conquered 

were human bodies: sweat, cornmeal, and tallow. 
Alta, California, established in 1769, a machine of labor 

swallowing everything in its path: aelo usque centrum
“from the sky to the center of the earth.”