by Steve Myers
He’s Energy’s emblem, this Key Largo
cotton mouse; Composure’s, this Wyoming toad,
both candidates for the Great Erasure
that wiped out the O’ahu ‘o ‘o bird,
the hoopoe starling, and the Mauritius owl,
all in 1837, the year Darwin
displayed his specimens, mammal and fowl,
in soot-choked London, and his countryman Hill
invented a glue for postage stamps from
potato starch, wheat starch, and acacia gum.
*
A marvel, the sinuous color-and-coil
of the San Francisco garter, so stark
a contrast to the Ur-stamp of them all,
the 1840 “Penny Black,” Victoria in profile,
the Queen just 21, already a bit
jowly with Empire in the year John Bull
declared sovereignty over New Zealand,
and, on its offshore archipelago,
the flightless Deiffenbacher rail went—
how else say it?—“the way of the dodo.”
*
The Mexican gray wolf seems to gaze
into the past, as if meditating
on the mass deaths of his distant cousin,
late of Hokkaido, when the Meiji
government engaged without irony
an Ohio rancher named Edwin Dun
to manage the genocide, his mission
accomplished in the 1880’s,
the decade global postage was revamped
with the advent of the machine-gummed stamp.
*
(I admit to anthropomorphizing
el lobo there. Out of sorrow, not crude
nostalgia. An empathy not pining
for the return of the 1990’s,
say— the era that introduced the self-
adhesive stamp and saw the last rising
of the dusky seaside sparrow. Rather,
that a mere 45 grays inhabit
the deserts of Mesoamerica—
that their vanishing would have magnitude.)
*
Aren’t we already waking them, even
as they slip away? Don’t we all feel it,
excepting the oilman, the lawyer,
the politician, the industrial
mega-farmer? Surely the mailman
walking his rounds in South Bend, Indiana,
feels it, who will carry this postcard
to my infant grandson—for which I’ve chosen
the Mississippi sandhill crane, picturing his joy
when he eyes that vivid forehead-splash of red.
*
The Anthropocene’s omnivore, for sure.
Will eat anything. Has made this sheet
of stamps its version of a winding sheet.
Has made slight the gospel: on Instagram
a local posts his photo of two bald eagles
in a backyard pine; this morning the Times
brings good news of the birth of Burmese
softshell peacock turtles. Maybe. Hard to read
the signs for the wildfire haze, to believe
the “forever,” in small print, lower case.
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and three chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he’s published poems in places such as Callaloo, New Ohio Review, SALT, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry and Valley Voices. He heads the poetry track for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at DeSales University.