Brandon Kilbourne
The Last Sea Cow's Testimony
Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas) first encountered Europeans in 1741 after the shipwreck of the St. Peter on Bering Island during the Great Northern Expedition. Within 27 years of its first contact with Europeans, the sea cow was hunted to extinction.
Fittingly, the first of them arrived
in disaster, as, like a whirlpool,
only disaster spirals about them—
As dawn gilded the bay after a night
of squall-stoked swells, we beheld them like
a haggard omen visited upon us by the tide:
not a single cow, otter, or seal could remain
incurious of the whale-sized driftwood
that they rode here wind-quickened
atop the waves, but before long though
we grasped that they know only to flout
their anatomy’s boundaries, for how else
could they dare the ocean to reach these floes
and snowy sands, and, plainly lacking flukes
or fins to scull home, strand themselves here?
Granted, they are resourceful, to and fro
the shore scouring for driftwood, from which,
somehow, they sparked light and warmth;
nonetheless, their frailty abounds—
From the shallows, we could watch their skin
blue from damp and blizzard, spy how
their number thinned, gaunt and stiff limbs
piled over with sand, how their sick laid prone
to the nibbling teeth of foxes, yet
never in the maw of an orca devouring a calf,
neither in the eyes of a cormorant, gullet full of fish,
nor in the face of an otter flecked with urchin
had we witnessed anything like their habitual
barbarity—I remember watching cows dragged
and beached on shore, their bodies methodically
butchered to the bone, my mate’s skin torn off
as she writhed her tail, the twin spurts erupting
from her opened back with each dying gasp,
my sight stained red as her life gushed out
into the water, and, as they took her apart,
their blood-splattered ardor—This slaughter
finding us nearly thirty winters ago, back when
every cow, otter, and seal had to learn survivor’s
wisdom: trade your curiosity for fear.
After they devised their escape from the island,
we thought that we could reclaim our peace,
returning to the lives we had before they came,
relish unbothered the last of the summer kelp,
the sea rocking us, bellies filled, to sleep,
sun-glints skittering wave-to-wave after days of fog,
until again, wind at their tail, they dotted the offing,
our dwindled herds yet dwindling as more and more
they arrived to haul us life-robbed from the water.
Now I am the last of the sea cows, my heart’s
continued beating, my tail’s propelling labor,
my streamlined existence all become hopeless
defiance of our disappearance. Departing seaward
into a sapphire void, I speak a vanishing tongue
now no one else understands to spite the silence
closing over us forever, entrusting this account
to my bones that will litter the seafloor, my eye sockets
soon home to crabs who will never glimpse a sea cow.
Muskox Memory
During paleontological fieldwork on Ellesmere Island
After more than two weeks,
our eyes have grown accustomed
to the tundra’s sprawling amnesia
of trunk and bough, yet this
morning, we encountered a muskox
become a memory succumbing
to moss, meat hook horns escaping
their skull’s green overgrowth.
We stopped to inspect the twin
curves of keratin, lingering and last
traces of a dead bovid’s debris, no
other bones visible among the green.
At month’s end, shortly after we return
south, the signs of our presence here
will begin to fade, much like the tracks
of unseen caribou and polar bears
crumbling in dried mud. Among these vales,
where for days we’ve seen nothing stir,
the Earth premonishes disappearance,
the rote perishing disposing of the likes
of trilobites and moas, ammonites
and pterosaurs, tree-tall horsetails
and mastodons, four-toed horses
and triceratopses, their saga of loss
unfolding since prototype microbes
first fashioned life out of lifelessness—
Their passing lies beyond the horizon
of our memory, whole species gone
and forgotten by changing landscapes
save for stone’s keepsakes: a handful
of skeletons, a shell’s whorls,
pressed leaves, or ambered insects.
While the others resumed their way
to the day’s digging, I lagged behind,
kneeling down in front of headstone horns,
my camera trained on a muskox’s grave
to snap a photo before sheaths and cores
are erased from the moss, cracked
and moldered by years of freeze and thaw,
their vanishing just as inevitable as
the departure, hopefully some millennia
after I myself am buried, of shaggy herds
adapted to Ellesmere’s unsparing wastes,
only a few remnant teeth or, perhaps,
a partial cranium left to attest deep
down out of mind in the Earth’s strata
that their hooves once traveled these valleys,
the fog of their breath evaporated
into winter’s night-air like a figment.
Photograph by Brandon Kilbourne
Originally from Louisiana, Brandon Kilbourne is a Pushcart-nominated poet and research biologist based at the Museum of Natural History Berlin. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Ecotone, Obsidian, Tahoma Literary Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. His work has also been translated into Estonian in Sirp.