Furs

Just before crossing the Snake River on 48,

I saw a crumple of rich, ruddy brown

sprawled across the white line. Too massive

for a deer or a racoon, it took the shape

of a human torso draped in an ancient

shaggy coat. The jut and slope

along the top looked like the arm

and shoulder of a man lounging,

Oscar Wilde smoking a pipe in bed,

or the old poet I saw once climbing

the steps to a stage in such furs, straight

out of a subzero night, pulling a pelt hat

from his white curls and stepping up

to the mike with bright bravado. It was

a beaver in the road, the dark paddle

of its tail spilled in my lane,

so I stopped because you rarely get to see

these creatures up close. Only their wreckage

on the land in late winter, the points

of gnawed stumps standing up in snow

like monster pencils. Its teeth were yellow

and bigger than you’d guess, curled

a bit as they are in cartoons.

I’ve seen hundreds of deer smeared

on this road, but beaver never. The toppled

pelt is rare and quaint as an old literary

lion losing his friends one by one, so he can

hold forth after the memorial reading with all

the stories he’s kept to himself so long,

stories that make the dead friend less.

I don’t know much about beavers except

that their lips close behind their teeth. I’ve trained

my lens on their dens in this sedge for hours

and never seen one moving, though

the long trails they gouge in snow tell me

where they came through, the tails, heavy

and scored as tongues, erasing their tracks

as they drag the woods under.

There’s not much here to see, but

the vision of the great poet wrapped

in such a fur and lying in the road

stays with me all the way into the cabin,

and it’s still there when I return to my anger

at the awful comments running down

a page under a photograph of two women

expecting a child. Nobody shuts down

the handful of men making snide

remarks about where the father is,

and though I sit here thinking of arrows

I want to sling, I know that it would not

make the young women feel better

to add my outrage. I don’t know enough

about beavers to know if that one was old,

or pregnant, or simply a very healthy specimen,

but its mass was impressive even stilled,

the fur slick and ripe as wind rifled

the carcass. The rage for beaver coats

once threatened them with extinction,

and woods tightened around clearings,

water sped elsewhere, all batter and light.

But here they are again laying claim

to acres and acres, making sure water

behaves around the fort they’ve built,

and, like us, making sure all avenues

of change are theirs by design.