Transport

Driving any country road at night, you’ll come

upon one—rabbit, possum, skunk, or raccoon—

run over again and again, a stretched shadow

flat as a footprint saying its only direction.

recently struck and almost recognizable.

It draped like cloth in my hands, boneless,

wet with its life in a smell not yet of decay

but of shorted-out heat, electric.

I laid bloody splinters and fur in roadside brush,

then wiped my hands on ditch-weeds in the dark

where I couldn’t name anything.

Now the pavement held only a thick stain

to burn out in tomorrow’s noon.

I thought of my own veins’ branching,

the working of intricate connections,

the laying down of ways of return.

Then I got in the car and drove on,

travels unraveling behind me

in thickening darkness broken

by nothing for miles but a rising one-way moon.