Now hear of Mammos' eldest children—
The ones who kept the oldest ways,
Who never left the ancient building
Of the egg behind, who spent their days
In the manner of the Mesozoic still:
Laying eggs, sweating milk from patches
On the belly's skin, the ancient fill
Of maternal care that predates the latches
Of the nipple and the placenta—
Monotremos, the first-born of the mammal line,
Who represents the living magenta
And fading ink of the original design.
For Mammos' house divided early
Into three great branches of the blood:
Monotremos first—who held the dearly
Ancient ways—then Marsupios, the flood
Of the pouched ones—and last Placentos,
The newcomer whose womb would change
The world—but first the old dispensation's
Story, and the southern range
Of Monotremos' strange and ancient house.
In Gondwana's south, where Antarctica
Was still forested and warm, the grouse
And fern and beech tree's cornucopia
Fed a world that would not last—
For Antarctica was drifting south
Toward the pole, and the forecast
Of ice was written in the mouth
Of every cooling current—but before
The ice, the monotremes walked those forests
And swam those rivers, and the shore
Of the southern ocean knew their chorused
And quiet presence—egg-laying mammals
In a warm and forested Antarctica,
A memory that only the enamel
Of ancient teeth and a scattered Antartica
Fossil record preserves.
When Australia
Broke from Antarctica and drifted north,
It carried Monotremos to the regalia
Of isolation—and from that point forth
The monotremes were locked in the southern cage
Of a drifting continent, alone
With the marsupials—and the Cenozoic age
Of the Northern Hemisphere was the unknown
And foreign country whose placental lords
Would never reach them.
Ornithorhyncos—
The platypus—of all the records
Of evolution's strangeness, the seance
Of the improbable made real: a mammal
With a duck's bill, a beaver's tail,
Venomous spurs, and the electrical
Detection of the river's frail
And tiny electrical signals—for the platypus
Hunts not by sight or smell or sound
But by reading the electrical fuss
Of every muscle-twitch that any creature found
Beneath the water makes—the bill
Is an antenna for the bioelectric field,
And the platypus reads the river's fill
Of shrimp and crayfish like a revealed
And living map of everything that moves.
He lays eggs—the mother curls around them
In the burrow by the riverbank, and proves
That the Mesozoic's way can still astound them
Who thought the egg was left behind:
The milk sweats from patches on the belly,
No nipple yet—the oldest kind
Of mammalian nursing, the jelly
Of maternal care in its most ancient form.
And Echidos—the echidna, the spiny
Ant-eater, who weathered every storm
Of the Australian interior, the tiny
And efficient tongue that probes the termite
Mound with the patience of a saint,
Protected by the porcupine's copyright
Of spines against the predator's complaint—
The echidna too lays eggs, a single
Leathery sphere deposited in the pouch
That the mother carries—the commingle
Of reptilian egg and mammalian crouch
Of care, the oldest compromise alive
Between the cold-blooded past and the warm-blooded
Future—the monotreme's archive
Of the mammal's deepest origin, flooded
With the memory of what Mammos was
Before the nipple, before the womb,
Before the placenta's elaborate gauze—
Just milk and egg and the warm room
Of the mother's body, the original
Mammalian contract: I will keep you warm,
I will feed you from myself, and the minimal
Technology of the egg is the first form
Of that promise.
Honor Monotremos—
The living fossil, the keeper of the oldest
Mammalian ways in Australia's hymns
And rivers—the humblest and the boldest
Of all the mammals: humblest in their ancient
Form, and boldest in their refusal
To change what works—the patient
And the beautiful, the eternal recusal
From the modern, the keeper of the flame
Of what Mammos was at the beginning.