Christopher Palmer: ‘Endling’ and ‘Where I go to disappear’

Endling
for Benjamin, the last thylacine

Like stripes they’ll love me, though they love me not.
Only I can know how the world sees me
and how I see the world. I walk my beat like a warning

the sum of all our days; subtraction after subtraction
until all that’s left is singlemindedness.
I know how slow we were; we didn’t see

how an unfolding story can be overwritten by time;
an ancient should amount to more than nothing.
But even water is remade, and our niche

will be filled by another—
probably that hairless and hungry animal
that only just passes for a species.

I copulate with the past
no longer listen to the sounds of nature;
instead, nature will play me back like a song,

and the lull after rain, the darting shape
in the shallows, that sound in the middle distance
will be my echo. I’ll be remembered in the wind’s will

wherever I paused to gauge the direction home. The soil
will taste my last traces and feel the last notes of body heat
for I came from the earth and…