Elegy for the Deodand

Maybe it was the hawthorn

scratching at the plate glass

that made Jim think of the elk,

the sharp wind off Coralville Lake

cutting loud across the wire grass.

He couldn’t remember

the story completely—

why the bull elk happened

into his neighbors’ garden,

or what signal it was

that warned them.

But the neighbor and his wife

had taken shelter

behind the bathroom door

when the elk charged.

The glass portico crashed,

giving way to that weight

of animal skull,

then the wildness

which tumbled in the bull

melted into agony.

And what happened next

is what often happens next.

When Jim arrived,

the beast was still beside the love seat,

lost in a world of his own blood,

mesmerized by the glittering

corona which surrounded him.

Jim described the shot

like the crack of an oak giving way.

Punished for what

he couldn’t understand,

or is punishment

even an applicable word?

Deodand, I think,

picturing the blood—

that principle of old English law

where the rain-soaked bough

which crushed the ox driver’s spine

must be splintered and scattered,

the waterwheel whose paddles

drowned the bather

must be salted and burned.

A thing forfeited or given to God

the text says.

To believe such a thing

is to imagine the world

as two natures.

The one where the bulls

locked antlers over harems.

The other a foreign code

under which the bull suffered.

But why the authority of one

over another?

Glowering at his own posturing,

the creature could not think

there might be one type of beauty

we must break through

to find another.

That we might die

trying to reach it.