Gambusia amistadensis

To obtain the perfect idea
of nothing, the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards wrote,
“we must think of the same

that the sleeping rocks dream of.”
Here, lined up on my windowsill:
nine gray rocks, faceted with pale yellow

and orange, powdery to the touch
and warm from the sun.
With equanimity, light pours through

the window onto all of them.
If they dream of you
then I can’t write about you

without writing about them, because no one else
can play their part, glossily lining
the bottom of Goodenough Spring,

the West Texas creek where you dart
like a shard of filigree, unblinkingly
swimming in a body

of water probably named for a family
with an old English name originally used
for someone whose accomplishments were average.

Gambusia, your name,
comes from the Cuban Spanish word
for nothing.

May I call you
Nothing. There is no hurry for you
to answer, or tell me which

is sadder: the dreams of rocks
or speaking to nothing.
The size of an ocotillo spine, you’re too small

to be fished for sport, not even the way
I’m fishing now, flipping through natural histories
for a mention of you, expecting a glint

of iridescence to swim up from an index.
In the heat of this devastating summer,
you seem as diminutively monumental as a glass paperweight

pinning down notes about the difference
between erasure and banishment
and yes I meant to write vanishment and now

I want both. When you appear
in Vanishing Fishes and Battle Against Extinction
you remind me that vanishment

can be conferred, like the language
of war, even onto a weaponless minnow
who weighs less than a bookmark.

When engineers build a dam across the Rio Grande
connecting Mexico and the United States
and name it Amistad, the dam becomes a symbol

of friendship, but when the Rio Grande is dammed,
water rises in Goodenough Spring, knocking
the stones shining under you,

churning and turbid and suddenly flooding
the creek, confluence, and headspring
that sustain a single species of gambusia

no one knows about
until 1968, post-dam, mid-flood, too late,
when ichthyologists discover you
darting through the suddenly flooding ocotillo

and prickly pear cactuses as water rises
over the riverbanks.
The scholarly paper that declares your discovery

declares your endangerment, and the authors
net and transfer you to a field laboratory
in Austin. Later, they move you to the Dexter National Fish Hatchery

in New Mexico in the 1970s and 80s
because you have “no historic habitat
remaining in nature” and there, in tanks, you go

full ghost.

May I call you extinct?
I was the second-to-last person
to see them alive,

says the ichthyologist in the museum I visit,
handing me a warm jar of you
jostling together in formaldehyde.

The last person to see you alive
is dead. I put you back
in the ichthyologist’s hands, he puts you back

at the back of a warehouse shelf. You’re removed
from the endangered species list
when I’m eleven, the same age

my twin daughters are now, now watching
the ocean throw thousands
of fish onto the Texas Gulf Coast. Take them,

the ocean seems to say, and not kindly, because
they’re dead, mostly asphyxiated
Gulf menhaden silvering the sand with the last

of their dazzle.

I once had a teacher
who asked me, What is another word
for lostness? I used the word too much.

I don’t remember my answer, lost now,
a little nothing to line up on the windowsill
next to the rocks, two seed pods, a burr,

one lobe of a tiny white mussel shell
with a buttery interior, and two vials
of water from the Amistad Reservoir

that a friend collected from your demolished habitat
to help me think of you, a fish named
for the dam that obliterated you.

What did it feel like
to lose your only home
is a question you do not have to answer.

After all, I am not your teacher.