Dead Skunk

Jan 14 2016

Dead skunks

are like winter lightning,

out of season

boding ill.

An arctic front had stalled

and the stench lingered for days.

In the extreme cold

the air was still, and dense

and weighed on the land like the ocean depths

where the valley bottomed out.

Scent, suspended,

complex molecules

still intact.

I imagined the animal dragging itself

to the road-side ditch;

its agony, flash-frozen,

spattered blood

still freshly red.

It took a week

for the stink to fade,

on the dip in the road

through the brooding forest

I drove each day.

Turkey vultures

would circle the body

soon enough.

Then foxes, wolves

feral dogs,

carcass gnawed

the heat of rot.

Until, by spring, it's mostly gone;

the thaw, smelling of earth,

bones, picked clean

a tuft of fur.

And a spot in the ditch

where weeds unaccountably flourish;

tall, and green

and rich with seed

I'll drive too fast to notice.

The stink of skunk slapped me in the face on the dip in the road day after day. It seemed out of season. It seemed to persist unduly, as if contained by the valley bottom and preserved by the cold.

This is another poem that begins in close observation and microcosm; that doesn't necessarily presume to do anything more than watch and record. Which is really the only thing that makes one a poet: that the eye and ear (and nose and hand and tongue) are more highly tuned; that one is more willing to pay attention. Although the last line of the poem -- I'll drive too fast to notice -- is closer to the truth: because even the most receptive and vigilant miss far more than we see, sleep-walking past the numerous minor dramas and existential struggles that are constantly playing out around us.

But I think the poem is more about the natural order of things -- nature recycling, life subsumed by other life, death and re-birth -- than it is about inattentiveness and self-absorption. Read closely, and see how it comes full circle: from the dead skunk to the flourishing weeds; from the stink of its spray to the loamy smell of freshly thawed earth.

I'm very partial to the first person point of view, and use it whenever I can. I think this makes a much more compelling read that the disembodied third person narrator. It engages the reader. It gives the work authenticity and authority. Here, the "I" enters infrequently, and with a light touch. Any more, and the repeated intrusion of the writer would be too distracting. Any more, and the final line would have too little weight.

(Of course, rhyme and rhythm always limit what I can do. Because the wolves would come first, and the foxes defer. And what ever happened to the crows and ravens and gulls, who are always happy to vulture-up road kill?)