The riverbank swallowed a month-old mammoth
calf, folded her under while her sisters
watched the sky’s benign orbital predations
its vagrant meteors blinking out targetless.
There was no mass annihilation, no crash
or crater, just her one misstep, a slipped stone
then mud bloom. No concussive tide no
flash flood that rafted the herd to sea
a humped and matted island, the ridged
lumps of our dorsal folds cragged to bear
darker unmoored winters. Her mammoth
body cast the earth hollow as her windpipe
choked beyond the grasp of sounder trunks.
I didn’t save her. She never called me back
her bronchia branching with silt, the cry
refurled in her chest. When the sons
of hunters lifted her limp and slumped
shrugged against her own resurrection
they called her Lyuba, for their mother
the way we all name our dead for our loves
our ghosts for our debts. Threadbare, nearly
coatless, her undercarriage creases deep
as an open palm: one forked line to mark her
thirty-five lived nights, a vertex split to predict
the epochs through which the river stilled
her from decay. Another line to reel her back
unburied, stitch the bitten tail, fix the chewed ear
snake the mud from her throat, bind her hide
to this life and not the next. From the thawed
banks of the Yuribey, Lyuba moors me, cranks
the yawn of her jaw, flats her hairless cheek to dam us
dry beyond the flood plain. I could press
my thumbs to the nubs of her tusks, hold her
like the river holds the torn mouth of the delta.
