Could Be the Antlers of a Nonexistent Creature

The poem of the woods of treed bear cubs
Several years ago by the side of the road

Where the thickset second-growth grows more
Luxuriantly than geriatric old-growth groves

To remind those who wander in here, lost,
That there's no here inherently indigenous

To anywhere less than anywhere on Earth,
Where the short-faced bears, giant sloths,

Camels, saber-toothed cats, and woolly elephants
All lived alongside such small black Cubs as these,

Such white-tailed, stripe-backed, masked
Face denizens as we, still hunkered down in the weeds

Where hunters and trappers and miners are ghosts,
Tries to save invasive phraseology to say

It's all what used to be and isn't now, isn't it?
As are all readers, poems, tribes, species, treed cubs anyway.