For Sydney Lea
This is my bonfire lit for you on this longest night of the year.
It burns in the dark like those poems of yours, where winter’s
a dying stove, a page of cold you’re snowshoeing across,
where it’s always so far below zero, but you still want to stay
in the cold Here of now to evade the colder moment to come.
Your poems remind me of when I, too, lived out of town
in an old farmhouse. They’re all drafty, those houses,
drafty as I am full of the long wind of my stories––
but I’m getting away from the gist of this poem,
which concerns the porcupine I shot out of a pine tree
one winter solstice afternoon thinking it was a bear,
then left behind, because, after all, it was a porcupine.
That night, my folksy hunter-housemate, a cook by trade,
told me I should have brought it home and went on and on
about the porcupine stew we’d make. . . . So, fortified with rum,
I snowshoed out those two moonlit miles: past the fox’s den,
smelling of skunk, on past the hemlocks creaking in the cold,
and the wild apples with one or two fruit still hanging brown
on the bough until I saw its body at the bottom of the pine:
all stiff in the white gleam and curled black into that frozen ball
of bristle and quills it had become. Still, I grabbed its tail
in my gloved hand just as the moon slid behind some clouds,
and I trudged back down the darkened woods road, snow
now my only light, the sound of my rackets whispering
a little heavier in the cold powder. All the way back
to more rum and the drafty warmth of an old farmhouse.
I think of you, Syd, as I dress this story on a slab,
as I finally confess we never made the stew
and my regret for killing this fellow creature.
And then I think of the stew of old age you and I
have both sunk into, all ghost-white like lumps
of potatoes, a stew that no porcupine can prick us
out of––that sad beast with its thousand quills
I should’ve at least tried to use for poems dipping
them into the inkwells puddling beneath the pines,
where the moon like a bright and final angel
can’t reach either of us on this longest night.