Endlings

Also by Joanna Lilley from Turnstone Press

If There Were Roads

Endlings

A collection of poems

about extinct animals

Joanna Lilley

Endlings

copyright © Joanna Lilley 2020

Turnstone Press

Artspace Building

206-100 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, MB

R3B 1H3 Canada

www.TurnstonePress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.

Cover image: Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus as drawn by Mary Anning, 1823, Wikimedia Commons.

Cover design: Melissa McIvor

Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Endlings : a collection of poems about extinct animals / Joanna Lilley.

Names: Lilley, Joanna, 1967- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190234288 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190234296

| ISBN 9780888016898 (softcover) | ISBN 9780888016904 (EPUB) | ISBN 9780888016911 (Kindle) | ISBN 9780888016928 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: Extinct animals—Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS8623.I43 E53 2020 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

For Nutmeg

and for Oscar

Snapdragon

Clyde

Willow

Briggs

Stratton

Zizi

Ash

Chamomile

Simon

Domino

Corky

Potty

Butterfly

Amelia

Cleo

Joplin

Rusty

Tabitha

Bambi

Dan

Tiger

Black Pudding

Minou

Boulter

Apple Pie

and Custard

The word endling means the last individual of a species or sub-species. It has not yet been included in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is probably only a matter of time.

Contents

Beauty

Speaking for themselves

We Are Weather

The Flightless Bird of Mauritius

If Rain Touched Me

For a Time a Constellation

Hunger

Goddess of the Yangtze

Water Diviner

Lepidopterology as a Method of Foretelling

Episodes of extinction

Accident

The Last Labrador Duck

The Last Heath Hen

Poplars, Sycamores and Oaks

The Foolish Dog of the South

The Whales of Herschel Island

Great Northern Expedition

Penguin of the North

On Eldey Island

Big Island

Takapourewa Wren

Great Claw

The River Breached

War Stories

In Białowieża Forest

Seven

Day and Night

Recorded for posterity

Official Announcement

Black

Nothing Can Be Done

When the Brigalows Burn

The Great Plains

Crossing

Spelunking

Desert Fish

Rewind

Grandmother’s Porch

Who on Earth

The Last Age

They Bring It On Themselves

Rainforest

Thawings

Necrofauna

White

The Last Song of the Kaua‘i ‘ō ‘ō

Encounters with paleontology

Collection

Omācīw

Death Pose

Herbivore

Leaning

Mother

Under and In Front

Letting

Diverted

Osteology

Sketches in Fossil

Dendrochronology

At the Laboratory

Impression

Transmutation

Skeleton City

Pangaea

How Carefully We Preserve the Dead

Specimen

Newfoundland

I saw you

I Hold Up My Hands

Gondwana

Northwest Passage

Yesterday’s Camel

At the Wildlife Preserve

Garden Lion

Off Course

Furbearer

Cornish Giants

Confession

A Record of Today Might Be

Flight Log

Witness

It’s Time to Talk of Hope

It Won’t Hurt

Endnotes

Index to Poems by Species

Sources and Resources

Acknowledgements

Endlings

Beauty

There’s a rumour about beauty,

its long whiskers and golden eyes,

its stripes as dark

as the moon shadows of trees.

There’s a rumour that the forest

took the beauty,

that the people who took

the forest took the beauty.

The beauty’s stripes tightened,

sliced right through—the people

said they had nothing to do with it.

The whiskers caught fire

and the golden eyes burned

right through.

—Javan tiger

Speaking for themselves

… I am every swim and wallow …

… we are as innumerable as stars …

… each of our stars will shatter …

We Are Weather

We are weather. Three days of dark.

A river in the sky. Red eye, always

seeing bird, billions of us, nesting

twenty miles wide, organized like bees,

unhiveable. We swallow beechnuts

whole, fill our crops with acorns.

We colonize this tree and that;

we break their branches.

We sweep leaves and ragweed up

into our stormy flock

and swirl the snow to earth.

A wingless throng might dash

dozens of us to the ground

with stinging sticks

but weather is invincible.

We are as innumerable as stars.

We are as perpetual as sun.

—Passenger pigeon

The Flightless Bird of Mauritius

No, no,

I have nothing

to say. No need.

Everyone knows me.

There is no requirement

to register, remark

on what is already recorded.

By all means, stare instead

at the over-middened moa,

my Antipodean protector, or

the ivory-billed woodpecker,

full-feathered forest dweller—

What? Did you say there was a tree

named after me?

I would point out,

perhaps,

as you are looking

that this is not all actually me.

I am bits

of others.

A borrowed carpal, vertebral rib,

an ersatz ulna.

My maxilla and mandible are mine,

my patellae, left