Have I published this?

 

THE SKUNK AND THE KITTY

 

On my way out, up the hill to where I go,

I passed a patch of road

where a skunk and a black cat

were both dead—road kill.

 

My car window was open

on an uncharacteristically warm

January morning—foggy and strange.

 

So I carried the skunk smell with me

all the way to where I was going.

Something about the smell of skunk,

millennia in development,

whether as evolution or God’s plan:

skunks have an odor to peal paint,

leave you hyperventilating

and just a little nauseous—

more than a little if smelled before breakfast.

 

I though all day, where I was,

about those two creatures—

dead as door nails and splayed on the road.

The cat was someone’s friend and companion.

The skunk was a marvel of defense mechanism—

a mother/father of small defense mechanisms.

Both were deserving of a better fate

than to swell and burst and decay on a state highway.

I prayed for them at noon prayers—

silently, of course, lest I seem to animistic in my faith.

The skunk and the kitty—both black,

both dead,

both nameless to me

(though the cat surely had one,

and who can say about skunks?)

so I couldn’t pray for them by name.

 

Going back down the hill,

from where I’d been to where I live,

I noticed the cat was gone—

claimed, perhaps by some human who loved her,

given a proper burial, mourned, missed.

Appropriate funereal rites, as bifit her.

 

The skunk was there still—

torn to pieces by the tires

of SUV’s, Buicks, foreign cars, UPS trucks.

 

His odor was less on the way back,

but, God bless him, still potent.

And I wondered—heretic and pagan

that I truly am—

whether he died for our smells….

 

 

jgb—1/30/09