Bluesky

Gambusia amistadensis

To obtain the perfect ideaof 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 touchand warm from the sun.With equanimity, light pours through

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

without writing about them, because no one elsecan play their part, glossily liningthe bottom of Goodenough Spring,

the West Texas creek where you dartlike a shard of filigree, unblinkinglyswimming in a body

of water probably named for a familywith an old English name originally usedfor someone whose accomplishments were average.

Gambusia, your name,comes from the Cuban Spanish wordfor nothing.

May I call youNothing. There is no hurry for youto answer, or tell me which

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

to be fished for sport, not even the wayI’m fishing now, flipping through natural historiesfor 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 differencebetween erasure and banishmentand yes I meant to write vanishment and now

I want both. When you appearin Vanishing Fishes and Battle Against Extinctionyou remind me that vanishment

can be conferred, like the languageof war, even onto a weaponless minnowwho weighs less than a bookmark.

When engineers build a dam across the Rio Grandeconnecting Mexico and the United Statesand name it Amistad, the dam becomes a symbol

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

churning and turbid and suddenly floodingthe creek, confluence, and headspringthat sustain a single species of gambusia

no one knows aboutuntil 1968, post-dam, mid-flood, too late,when ichthyologists discover youdarting through the suddenly flooding ocotillo

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

declares your endangerment, and the authorsnet and transfer you to a field laboratoryin Austin. Later, they move you to the Dexter National Fish Hatchery

in New Mexico in the 1970s and 80sbecause you have “no historic habitatremaining in nature” and there, in tanks, you go

full ghost.

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

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

The last person to see you aliveis dead. I put you backin the ichthyologist’s hands, he puts you back

at the back of a warehouse shelf. You’re removedfrom the endangered species listwhen I’m eleven, the same age

my twin daughters are now, now watchingthe ocean throw thousandsof fish onto the Texas Gulf Coast. Take them,

the ocean seems to say, and not kindly, becausethey’re dead, mostly asphyxiatedGulf menhaden silvering the sand with the last

of their dazzle.

I once had a teacherwho asked me, What is another wordfor lostness? I used the word too much.

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

one lobe of a tiny white mussel shellwith a buttery interior, and two vialsof water from the Amistad Reservoir

that a friend collected from your demolished habitatto help me think of you, a fish namedfor the dam that obliterated you.

What did it feel liketo lose your only homeis a question you do not have to answer.

After all, I am not your teacher.