going nowhere, by Roy Geiger

White Rhino, by Tom Benner (Canada) 1985. Photo from Museum London, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, via Flickr.

going nowhere
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a white rhinoceros polishes up the hours on the banks of the deshkan ziibi in the short grass well lets be frank on the museum lawn      this rhino winks as if to say here I will survive being metal with a hide full of rivets is a small price to pay don’t I look right at home here not inside like some out-of-place plunder     every once in a while someone comes after the rhino’s horn cuts it off for reasons obscure to reasonable creatures or sprays graffiti on it or tips it over to jump on its aluminum side but the rhino knows it will be repaired restored to itself winks again as if to say wow repaired 
 
the gp with wild red hair and her oncologist husband a large buff-coloured man whose gentle cultivated manner didn’t quite hide suppressed wildness seemed very tentative about asking my profession and were somehow relieved it wasn’t something disgraceful though I would never know what that might have been since we were on safari in the Kalahari much conversation revolved around animals of all kinds like the cheetah we only saw at significant distance and no one who looked in the remorseless black-pupiled eyes of the banded lions with their torn-apart antelope said they were tame      the gp and oncologist once had a game farm not the kind he said where you keep animals to hunt so you could bag some big game if that happened to be on your bucket list no it was a place for some animals to live he said we need to keep them any way we can      they couldn’t hang on to the game farm she said had to sell before their rhino was poached      lovely animal he said beautiful animal I used to drive out and sit beside it in my truck loved that tough spectacular skin    if they’d kept the farm he said he would have tracked down killed the inevitable poacher and then be jailed a murderer life ruined     they fell serious some heavy counter had been played      we asked whether we would be the poacher ourselves if our lives were desperate      we admitted we might 
 
let us set aside mythology personal and otherwise     anthropocentrism     our disturbing interest in the nearly gone large and charismatic creatures and consider while there’s still time in this watershed by the banks of the deshkan zibii where the endangered include but are not limited to american badger spiny softshell turtle red-headed woodpecker eastern sand darter eastern flowering dogwood red mulberry butternut      the white rhino winks once more as if to say all will look good in aluminum if that’s what it comes to if that’s what you want
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​Roy Geiger

A former college English teacher, Roy Geiger lives in London, Ontario, and spends a lot of time on Manitoulin Island. He has volunteered on the board of several long-standing reading series, including Antler River Poetry. His poems and short fiction have been anthologized and published in Grain, The Antigonish Review, the temz review, and The Ekphrastic Review.