God is a field biologist,
a meticulous observer not given to experiments
except that just this once in His infinite,
if slightly off-hand, sagacity, He has
appointed me poet-in-residence in the Late Permian.
You do feel that here is a deity
capable of enjoying the irony
that His chosen method of originating species
was discovered by someone
with the same beard as Himself.
So I’m based in my new office
on the North coast of India
somewhen between the coal swamps and the dinosaurs,
when the world was the scene
of a three cornered fight for super-continental hegemony.
The tortoises, predictably, got off to a slow start
but the other two great lineages
waddled and bellowed with equal enthusiasm
among the Early Permian reeds.
In one corner: they are the starlings.
They’ll be the geckoes, triceratopses and jenny wrens,
though as yet they still look like kind of fat lizards.
In the other corner: the dogs.
We’ll be the dimetrodons, mammoths and monkeys
though as yet we still look like kind of fat lizards.
But the world is going to us.
After a few experiments heating the blood
with fragile solar-powered radiators on our backs,
we have gained the crucial advantage
of making our own body temperature.
We’re bristly. We’re learning to chew,
to comfort our pups with our warm Therapsid flanks,
to nuzzle muzzles in the night
and first thing in the morning
when the coldbloods gawp in scaly torpor
we are alert, ambitious.
They have barely begun to develop
their own big ideas, though they’re good ones:
getting up on their back legs,
gliding through the air,
and heading to the sea,
standing on the rocks at the shoreline,
necks weaving in goosy consternation.
We are the dogs and we are hungry
and that, in retrospect, will have been our mistake.
The Late Permian is an antediluvian moment,
soon the slow collision of continents
brings a sudden geological release of methane,
the planet heating, plankton dying,
oxygen failing, brimstone fumes rising
from the sea to asphyxiate the energetic.
The coldbloods will wake
to an empty world, the advantage theirs.
Their gliders will begin to flap,
their paddlers, to swim,
their bipeds, cruelly, will learn our trick of warm blood.
Huge carnivorous starlings will tear into
huger herbivorous starlings,
flailing in lumbering cataclysm,
horned in their triumph,
roaring and stomping and sliding
in their outrageous piles of giant nitrogenous dinosaur guano.
We are the dogs.
We’ll hide behind trees like nervous Pomeranians.
It’ll be skulk and survive.
Till one day, and it really will be a single day
that begins like any other,
the disasteroid, the fall of the sky hammer,
and the next day, a night of hurtling cinders.
The starlings will have been knocked off their perch.
The old dogs will be back and in our wilderness years
we’ll have learnt new tricks:
gestation, lactation and education.
And then we’ll learn the enemy’s tricks too:
returning to the sea,
taking to the sky (at night, at least)
and even getting up on
our back legs.
And this, in retrospect, will have been another mistake.
Because when a gormless, egg-laying, carnivorous,
twenty foot, flightless whistler
pads around on the back foot,
goggling round corners
and menacing the undergrowth,
it frees its hands to snatch and hold and
bite the heads off little weaselly wrigglers.
But when a hairyhead with a ten-year childhood,
a slow-growing brain and eyes like souls,
suddenly discovers hands on the ends of its arms,
well, it picks things up and says:
“You know what, I could do something with this,
in fact, come to think of it,
I could cave your face in.
“I could dig a hole,
burn stuff to keep warm,
turn those trees into a fence to keep you out
and I’m thinking of starting a blog.”
And, dogs that we are, it’ll all get out of hand,
the burning, the plankton dying,
it’ll be the Late Permian all over again.
And in another 251 million years
we’ll be someone else’s fossil fuel.
My sponsor remains detached,
almost to the point of rudeness,
and the tortoises are peeping out
from inside their shells,
their grape-seed eyes black with hope.
© Will Holloway 2011
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