Whales know how. Like this:

you swim alone in cold enormity,

crying who is it, where, come

closer, changing the melody,

filling the one salt womb

across four thousand miles.

Elephants also. Go on: rumble

your desire. Seismic waves

roll under vast savannas.

Far-off feet vibrate in solidarity.

Land becomes your instrument,

the lithosphere your drum.

Try giraffes, who hardly even

have a voice by day: separate,

you hum to one another through

the night, string an invisible

powerline, a subliminal violin,

making dreamers shiver.

Or cranes: up 20,000 feet,

crossing the hemisphere,

the trachea coiled and crammed

inside your keeled breastbone

bangs on your heart as you shake

skies with the unison call.

Or oak, any of the standing people:

you keep sewing secret threads

among species, lovers touching

under the table; while at the party,

on the wind, you mingle, warn,

insist: now, bloom now.

And the fungi, for heaven’s sake,

deathcap, angel’s trumpet, are you

listening? Even the least orchid,

whose seed is one grain of dust, one

drop of oil. You cast yourself into

a throng, into the stratosphere.

Not to mention stars who stream

gases and gravity across the void,

trying to coalesce: you are flung

apart, together, circling galactic

center. Your crazy orbit wobbles,

but go on. This is how we sing.

Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take My Arms In The Dark and the editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her poems are in journals in seven countries. As a Virginia Master Naturalist, she helped create and interpret the Sensory Explorers' Trail at Sky Meadows State Park.