Monson, Ander

Dear Boar,

1. but for whom, my first entry into the state of Alabama,
2. coming in just before midnight through Tupelo,
3. a smear of a town, famous mostly for giving birth
4. to the careering mess and mass of the velvet pelvis
5. we call Presley, would have been uneventful,
6.  
7. and so I thank you for your sacrifice–
8. the gristle of your side against my Maxima’s grille,
9. a kind of duel that you met and swiftly lost.
10. This was one of many road incidents in Mississippi,
11. a state that’s grown to hate me,
12.  
13. for every time I’ve driven through it at night,
14. even after proper pauses at gas stations to pour libations
15. to Jesus, god of the South and of the moss and of the rusty
16. crosses stuck deep in the holy roadside mess,
17. I have met my match in trash on the road,
18. one time you, boar, cur–that bit of fur shoved up under
19.  
20. the dashboard somehow through the vents, an interrup-
21. tion in my bored dash dot dash dot dash dot dash
22. to and from Tuscaloosa, home of the Crimson Tide and
23. Bear Bryant’s angry, lonely, reanimated corpse.
24.  
25. The second time, harangued
26. by some kind of metal box
27. that amputated most of my exhaust system,
28. on the way home from Shreveport, Louisiana,
29. city of a 24-hour-lit disc golf course and a serious
30. problem with pornography, and my friends
31. who live there in what they term (don’t ask) “The Chicken Ranch.”
32.  
33. After impact, my sad lope home
34. punctuated by road spark singing along
35. with my trailing muffler for the last one hundred miles.
36.  
37. I don’t ask any kind of forgiveness, boar,
38. as I don’t believe in it, and it’s unclear
39. what’s become of you–I saw you only in my lights
40. in impact and forever from the rear,
41. a burst of ham ambling afterward into the trees,
42. pissed-off conventioneer in search of your last
43. convention.
44.  
45. And I see you circling back in dreams,
46. in the temperature of fur I picked out of the grate
47. (there is always more of it: tied flies
48. barbed later in my brother’s shoulder, that Russian winter
49. hat I wore through most of eighth grade in my short life
50. as a Communist, the dried out dandelion bursts
51. that haunt late summer evening air in Iowa
52. like paratroopers, like perspiration).
53.  
54. I could almost see you sneer
55. as if to say that you knew and had seen things
56. that I did or would or could not handle: the breast of light
57. crashing through the burdock, the souvenir
58. bone picked clean after the last big winter freeze,
59. what’s left of my unhappiness, evidenced by Prozac
60. and Sisters of Mercy records played at top volume,
61. my inebriated roommate perforating the dorm room walls with fists.
62.  
63. Your life exists opposite of mine–my quick exodus
64. from the crime scene South, your fall and rise,
65. return to all the glistening bristle in the world down there,
66. and we are thus in this together, mythological gerbil
67. and Richard Gere; drunken night and bathtub filled with ice,
68. and scar fresh-stitched across the belly; pan flute and Zamfir
69. playing it, repeating now on television, on the run
70. inexplicably from the KGB, soothing music
71. like a Bronx cheer in an elevator.
72.  
73. Friend Gemini, fur twin, if it must go down like this,
74. I won’t complain, you be my dueler, my duende, doppelganger,
75. and we will meet later in this fiscal year to bout with tusks
76. or puns or guns at dawn. You, the prosecution; I defense:
77. after voir dire and the commencement of the trial, we’ll meet
78. over chill beers in cozies with your brother, the aerospace engineer
79.  
80. –have I taken this too far? should I proceed?
81. should I stay here or veer away from sound?–
82.  
83. to discuss the elasticity of shear (waistband returning
84. to its original form, post-snap and unforgiving welt),
85. and how that might come to bear on those
86. who troll the woods with fire, with lights and camouflage
87. and guns and beer, those hunters with their loneliness
88. and chew and scopes and silent hours, that perfect sphere
89. of a day spent without intention or interruption by form,
90. that constant threat of being shot at or hit
91. and shoveled to the side of rural route number five,
92. that burden that the deer bore.