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The Fourth River

A Journal of Nature and Place-based Writing Published by the Chatham University MFA Program
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Photo by Mary Beth Ely

Endangered Species Stamps

December 4, 2024

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.

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