I remember once I burned some brush
and raking later found a toad
baked, immobile
but intact,
like a Vietnamese monk,
its limbs at rest,
not splayed in some last
leap for life.
My memory is patchy, I think,
too full, perhaps
corroded by drink, or worse,
blocked by tangled neurons
like a road after a storm.
But some things never fade;
the toad is one, and I mourn 
it daily, even when
humans claim newer space.
Albanians fall and roll
in the red grass,
children wield guns,
and the toad still
crouches in my mind.
I think of its cells exploding
and they seem grievable to me,
spewing lysosomes and chromatin,
leaking ribosomes and all
the miraculous machinery of life.
And molecules, too, God’s tinkertoys,
the bonds severed,
the electrons flung off into space.
Who mourns these microscopic parts?
Where do they go?
Do they resist their dissolution?
It seems to me
we don’t see
the delicacy of creation
but crash around
in metal boots
blind to all the levels of destruction.
If we thought of cells,
if we thought of molecules,
every moment, every day,
the awe would tame us.