Rhinoceros Relic

by BRANDON KILBOURNE

On a diorama of the Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) at the Copenhagen Zoological Museum. Critically endangered, the total population for the species is estimated at fewer than 80, and possibly even fewer than 50, individuals.

In the guise of sunlight breaking
through a canopy of wax leaves,
a patch of lamplight salvages
the forequarter robust as a column
from a body dissolved in darkness,
attesting that they once lumbered
outside of memory’s borders
between first charging out of the Miocene
and vanishing into diorama shadows—

Panzer-hide shoulder 
the neck downward sloping
to a wood-burl eye.

Born of mud-wallows, lianas, and mists,
a skin preserves the extant likeness
of an intended mother taken as air cargo
crated crampedly to Copenhagen’s gray
concrete, metal bars, and heating,
on the gamble her newborns would ensure
that those mud-wallows, lianas, and mist-
slicked thickets would always harbor
fresh tracks bearing three broad toes—

Paired and namesake
horns borne atop a head, low
barrows stricken with myth.

The zoo’s dead captive imitates
its life in a locale of faux mud fitted
with kingfishers, stick insects,
and stalks of bamboo, their display
an elegy in gloom—glass eyes cry
pristine boles falling before plantations
and habitats invaded by logging trucks,
faces clear-cut to oblivion
by our keratinous greed—

Rainforest behemoth, relict
red hair recalling woolly kin
grazing on Ice Age steppes.

Behind an exhibit’s pane, taxidermied
feet fill the footprints of a lost species,
leaving a mounted remembrance
tangible for its final refuge: our fantasy
where wild animals live on and still exist
with nostrils estranged from their breath,
bodies stiff bereft of the faintest twitch,
and no note of bird-trill is to be heard
in a glassed-in jungle’s cemetery-silence.

Shrine to an extinction’s skin, beast
shepherded to the fabled ranks of a ram
golden fleeced—priceless once flayed.