Today blackbirds fell from the sky in Arkansas.
 
On the coast of South Africa,
fifty-five pilot whales
beached themselves in the sand.
 
I consider the squirrel,
dead on the highway,
 
and the cosmos,
how everything began like opening
a bag of potato chips.
 
Scientists still don’t understand string theory,
or how the whales got lost.
 
This morning I found a rat skeleton
by the wheel of my car,
another outside the door to work.
 
One day my cat caught a mouse,
but left it, still living, on the patio.
 
It breathed hard
and looked around at the eucalyptus trees.
 
The heaviness of a last breath seemed
immense. I couldn’t take it
from the mouse. I just watched
 
and waited. The pressure
of the atmosphere on the lungs
was too much.
 
Animals know what they’re doing,
but I cannot turn off
the motor in the heart, beach myself
on a lonely coast.
 
I look on the internet again.
More dead blackbirds,
this time in Kansas.
 
The whales are so big
that scientists have gone down
to the beach to euthanize them.
 
Some things are so heavy
we can do nothing
to put them back where they belong.