(20,000,000 BC – 2006 AD)

 

Been called drowned girl

Yangzte goddess, shallows ghost

glint, surge beneath the glint

 

but in the end I, dolphin, became

my own namesake, lipotes: the left-behind

a singularity and relic of the spillway

from a Miocene sea.

 

Once I was a blue carve of mid-river purls

one among many  rippling
through meres and meanders

eddies and oxbows of the Yangtze

 

but I have no name for this waterway

my river has become

grimed and dimmed

my clan caught in darkwater slipstreams

beneath massive surface machines

 

and I, left-behind, chasing random

echolocations of absent cousins—

or is it angry gods calling me downriver

and out to an unnamable sea?