Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

1. Rock-like Object on Beach The Paleocene the Eocene the Miocene the Pleistocene and now we’re here: the Plasticene. Look, a rock made of sand and one of lime, and one of quartz, and one of what is this? It’s black and striped and slippery, not exactly rock and not not. On the beach at any rate. Petrified oil, with a vein of scarlet, part of a bucket maybe. When we’re gone and the aliens come to puzzle out our fossils: will this be evidence? Of us: of our too-brief history, our cleverness, our thoughtlessness, our sudden death? 2. Faint Hopes You could turn it into oil by cooking it: this has been done. First you’d have to collect it. Also there would be a smell. Some supermarkets have banned it. Also drinking straws. Maybe there will be a tax or other laws. There are microbes that eat it— they’ve been discovered. But the temperature has to be high: no good in the north sea. You can press it into fake lumber but only some kinds. And building blocks, ditto. You can scoop it out of rivers before it gets to the sea. But then what? What do you do with it? With the overwhelming ongoing never-ending outpouring? 3. Foliage “a scrap of black plastic—the defining foliage of the oil age” MARK COCKER, OUR PLACE It sprouts everywhere, this foliage. Up in the trees, like mistletoe, or caught in the marshes or blooming in the ponds like waterlilies, gaudy and frilly, rippling as if alive or washing onto the beaches, neo-seaweed of torn bags, cast wrappers, tangled rope shredded by tide...