The Cull - May 20 2022

 

The Cull

May 20 2022

We're all dodging potholes,

braking, swerving

careening down the road,

veering over the centre line

on a slalom course home.

A hard winter;

while a late spring has whip-sawed

from freeze to thaw and back.

So I was distracted,

focused on the road directly out front

when the rabbit darted out;

a fleeting blur

in my peripheral vision,

then short dull thump.

A beautiful creature

still in his soft winter white.

Small black eyes

lustrous as billiard balls.

Over-sized paws

and strong hind legs,

long tapered ears

inquisitively twitching.

Or her.

A mother, with newly born young

left alone in some burrow somewhere.

Who will freeze

starve

or be eaten by foxes

when she fails to return.

Natural selection at work?

The offspring

of an unfit mother

unsentimentally culled?

So is it fate?

Dumb luck?

Evolution's inscrutable purpose?

Or a version of fitness

unheard of before?

Bad drivers

selecting for animals

who are wary of roads.

Just as we are blithely shaping the rest of world

to our flaws and appetites.

One dead rabbit

and a sickening remorse.

The utter randomness

of who lives and who dies

is not only sobering

but strikes close to home;

our own near misses

the illusion of agency.

Although the suddenness of death

is at least merciful;

who doesn't wish

for it to be painless and quick?

She will be missed.

And I, at least, will remember;

blood on the fender,

body parts stuck in the wheel well.

In the mood to write, but with no compelling idea to inspire me, I fell back on the old adage that says ”write what you know.” And right now, that's potholes. So after the first two stanzas, at a loss to know where this thing was going, I was as surprised as the reader probably was by the direction the poem took. But as soon as I wrote back (it was originally between freeze and thaw),the word distraction popped into my head, and it was all suddenly clear. Initially, it was a deer. But I've written too many deer poems, and so needed something fresher. The rabbit incident occurred years ago. But anytime your car kills a beautiful wild animal it's deeply disturbing, and stays with you. The unlikely intersection in time and space. The vibrant life so instantly snuffed out. The suffering. The terrible meaninglessness.

How nice to be able to use a word like careen. For a language pedant like me, to have the chance to exercise — in the interest of clarity and precision — the useful distinction between it and “career” is very satisfying indeed!

Evolution, of course, has no purpose, direction, intelligence. So very much inscrutable! It simply goes where survival takes it. “Fitness” is not some absolute concept. Rather, it is contingent, narrowly specific to the time and place. To depict evolution as a tree, heading ever skyward to some perfectly wrought creature, or inevitably favouring the refinement of advanced intelligence, is wrong. We may have the biggest brains, and they may serve our particular needs pretty well, but we are not its most successful experiment: our place at the end of the highest limb should not be taken as a value judgment. If anything, sponges and jellyfish are: so perfectly suited to their circumstance that they have survived unchanged for 100s of millions of years. Job accomplished. And now that it did such a good one with those two, evolution gets to take a rest.