Lettow-Vorbeck and His Uncatchable Lizard
Shortly after WWI, the dinosaur Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki was named for the German general Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck for his defiance of Allied forces in East Africa during the war. From East Africa, the dinosaur’s name means “Lettow-Vorbeck’s uncatchable lizard,” being derived from Greek.
A dinosaur christened in honor of your valiant service:
an uncatchable lizard for the uncatchable general.
Epochs upon epochs before becoming der Löwe
von Afrika for your wartime exploits of raiding and
evasion that drove the British to pursue in vain
your lone and vastly outmanned Schutztruppe
across savannah and forest for four man-killing years,
your dinosaur relied on fleet limbs to escape the jaws
of Jurassic predators in the land you would later
defend as Deutsch-Ostafrika with dwindling forces.
Its long tail would counterbalance the body nimble
on two legs as your beast darted about to fulfill
its niche of munching on leaves—the small head
and tiny hands, the peg teeth woefully antithetical
to the arts of aggression perhaps leaving your namesake
as something of a let-down and you a misnomer
for a creature so ill-equipped for devouring valor—
With locusts’ unsparing hunger, you and your askaris
wantonly consumed fields and livestock, relieving
food from the mouths it was reared to feed, giving
in return calamity to land-grab colonies: mass famine
to fuel European shells falling on African soil,
boneyards sprung from villages starved and skeletons
by the multitude marking routes trod by your troops.
But after seeing the bone-lean bodies trailed behind
your soldiers’ growling stomachs, the unearthing
of your uncatchable lizard would have offered you
a sight recognizable though rewritten in rock: mass death
albeit fossilized as ribs and femora, vertebrae and maxillae
jumbled in the thousands, remains of tide-drowned
herds befitting the toll of your disaster, the bellies
without number that you condemned to die empty.
To your name, your dinosaur brings an exhumed honor:
its bones bestowing on you the renown of a mass grave.
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The Location We Look For
Arriving on Ellesmere Island
Their propellers’ spinning now killed,
we disembark to the sound of the twin
otter’s engines cooling off, metal ticking
from heat lost to the Arctic’s cold.
So the pilot can get on with his return
to Resolute, we empty the plane’s
red-and-white body of our gear, piling on
the shore the plaster, the chisels and mauls,
tents, glue, brushes and awls, eight
sleeping bags and rucksacks, a jackhammer
and shovels, plus hand lenses, along
with a stove and the month’s supply of food.
As our ride shrinks to a speck, the drone
of its propellers thinning into silence,
we survey the shore, our eyes seeing nothing
but ice’s white, mud’s brown, and the blues
of languorous waves and cloudless skies,
the seashore’s wash and swatches of slush
embellished with unimpeded sunlight.
But we have not come for this place.
The location we look for lies underground,
now a memory repressed down in rock
recalling this island before it was even
an island, where a fish and its near kin
tinkered with fins to bear a body’s weight
and free themselves from water, back when
this land beneath our feet sat at the Equator
and was teeming with tropical swamps and,
horsetail forests towering above the water,
before its landmass travelled the oceans,
tectonic clockwork conveying its shores
to the Arctic amid drifting continents.
Caving to curiosity, we comb the beach,
turning up among damp and pebbled soil
to the tactile fascination of our fingertips
the bleached heel bone and vertebrae
of a hapless seal, the broken humerus
and ulna of perhaps a tern, the armor husk
of an isopod large enough to fill our palms with
remnants of spent life yet to be erased.
Here, at the outset of our month on Ellesmere,
to retrace how fish equipped us for footsteps
by pioneering the vertebrate limb, we pore
over our finds, their presence on this shore
short-lived as if script on parchment ever
scraped clean by changing latitudes and climate,
the island’s older chapters effaced with death
and the birth of new species, habitats anciently
vanished into the ground we now stand on,
their traces left behind as fossils made legible
with the blade of a shovel and a drizzle of glue.
