Werewolf on the Moon
You want to touch big animals,
animals not touched by your peers
Woe is not you
You have the polar bear in Franz
Josef Land, the white whale in the Sea
of Okhotsk,
You have the brown bear, leopard
& Amur tiger in Ussuri, the Far
East, so east, like a talon
it hooks Heilongjiang, claims
that edge of Pacific, that swath of
maritime lands & a maritime state —
Primorsky Krai, home
to Vladivostok, the ancient Manchurian
forest, its corresponding duck,
a short North Korean river-
border changing course, redrawn
when the bank sloughs off,
its markers slipping, washing
away — Tumen, sputtering
into the Sea of Japan
There is an awareness of islands —
Oshima, Okushiri, Hokkaido —
tucked into the brain of every organism
Volcanics, large to small,
they perforate the waters northeast
to Kamchatka (& that is so far
your countrymen send
their misbehaved children
to so-called corners in their houses)
Perhaps you can stand
on that shore facing inland & gaze
out over the spray of those white
whales of yours, the expanse
that comprises your jurisdiction
Now, what’s the first thing you know
is there, but can’t see for mist, et al:
Khabarovsk Krai, whose coat of arms
is a bear holding a coat of arms
of a bear & a tiger holding
a blue & yellow coat of arms,
inverted Y, tiny crown afloat, big bear
pinching his canoe-shaped tongue
between his teeth —
& what tumbles from there but
Black Dragon, scrawling from Inner
Mongolia to Tartar Strait, true,
for all its bordermaking, to its roots
From it & all its names, names
for everything: for islands, for fables,
the provinces it traces, for
gruesome late-Mongol conquerors
& the surrounding biology
You think about it
now & again, thumbing
a leatherbound natural history,
gift from a pandering
South American delegation ripe
with stories about their jaguar, the early
explorers who called it tigre
In the world, there are 9 subspecies
of tiger, all eastern, 3 of them extinct
Amur is classified as merely endangered
& concentrated in Ussuri State
Nature Reserve, where you are known
because you shot one
It is somewhat a farce
There is no state — not since Bolshevik
word set foot there — only a river
bearing the name & you
commissioned the research: to study everyone
with a name on the Red List
of Threatened Species, to house
data online at programmes.putin.kremlin.ru,
to visit them all & each visit
to carry an air gun & a satchel
of tranquilizer darts, to shoot, to topple,
to affix the GPS collar, to caress
the fur (in the case of the whale
the skin) & muse to scientists about
the big, sleepy oaf:
Would she remember, or eat you, or both?
by Amanda Calderon
from Poetry July,August, 2014