Megafauna

Zoology: the large mammals of a particular region, habitat, or geological period
Ecology: animals that are large enough to be seen with the naked eye
(www.oxforddictionaries.com)

1.

Here be… Megalania?
The ring’s just not the same,
the legs too short too, &, alas,
no wings. But still Diptrodon
was no match for: razor tooth,
paralytic venom drip, & speed.
Or was it the tyrant lizard who

first inspired stone throwers to
venture out for hero-quest?
After all, his feathers now suggest
that once or future flight: a short
leap between continents to behold
Microraptor: gliding between palms.


2.


Once upon a time in The Great Lakes,
Castoroides ohioensis loomed large
the Indiana nights, with or without a
paddle tail, her six inch incisors gleaming
in the moonglow on the Kankakee marsh.
With a heft the size of Ursus americanus,
this rodent was no easy prey, and her pelts
were not taken often, if ever. But a dam-
less life & another glaciation left it lacking,
unfit: only a fossil’s life left for collecting.


3.


But it’s the seas that breed the biggest beasts:
No, not Nessie, but Ocean roamers tiny necked.
Kronosaurus, nearly fifty feet of nastiness,
writhing through the briny depths to avenge
his namesake’s punishment for Titanic lust.


Medusozoa’s Cambrian forbears, dried up,
dread-snakes & all, found by flat-footed
Kansans in the (underwater) deserts of Utah,
tableau the slowness of earliest thought:
nerve-nets that not so soon became brain.
Still the largest living roam with Lion’s Mane,
or gather in Nettles, or wander as lonely Cannonballs.


Cethorinus maximus is “cosmopolitan” despite
his open mouth & krill swilling intemperance.
What it basks in one can’t be sure, but brine’s
whitest glow brings it up to feed & feel the glow.
His teeth unnecessary but for the hold-on that
ensures the wild ride that provides propagation.
This gentle giant tugs at what is fathomable for
we, newbies, so allegoric to the dark & deep.


4.

But to speak ecologically: even the tiny are mega.
As when the eye picks up a miniscule speck of red
migrating across sidewalk earth—or a flattened book
beast hides in the precipitous gutter of an old tome.
These tiniest megafauns still loom large & long.


To look carefully is to know the difference between
the (mostly) harmless clover-mite whose worst is to
deposit an algae haze on my redbrick, of colossal scale,
& their larger cousin, Trombiculidae, whose chigger-itch
can send their more mega-host, us, scratching the walls.


But it’s in the longer term that the mini-mega show
their stature. Take up the book again & search that
middle ground between old & new to find the little
diggers eating at the truth & lies of paper-immortality.
Psocoptera & Silverfish, paper-dragon & book-shark,
hole their way through tragedy, comedy, & history alike,
so the small may be large, long before the first become last.