I Promised Myself I Wouldn’t Go a Day Without Finding a Poem
The skunks are back and they lurk somewhere undiscoverable
until the evening, the same as a year before. Gone
with only their outlines traced in scent on the back steps, fading
into the wind until there is no light. So again, I say,
let us switch on the metal lamp that shines out the windows
in more lumens than necessary for any set of three light bulbs.
Let the light flood out into the backyard, making the separations
between blades of grass visible again, and maybe
when the skunks can see them they’ll back away in fear.
Like a year ago; let it all be like a year ago,
when the moles gave way to the skunks
but the skunks gave way to the light
because the animals can’t take its pollution
anymore. We switch the light on,
facing southwest, then off again.
For two nights they return, and on the third
once again we switch on the lamp
of three bulbs but there’s four of the creatures
so they are not perturbed. On they crawl,
under the cold glow, under the fence
and through to hole beneath the deck
we’ve tried to fill in too many times to count.
It’s only a matter of time until they spray
so I practice how to breathe through my mouth
and hope I can’t taste smells anymore like I used to.
Two stories beneath, a mother swaddles her child in cobwebs
in the shelter she’s finally found, in the shelter her kin return to
year after year to bring comfort to at least the beginning
of their youngest’s lives. It’s ruthless, out in the world of light.
I should know. You should know. If one can’t take the LED daylight,
it’s a sure demise. The fittest will survive, won’t they? And then they’ll grow
to pass on their traits, and eventually immunity develops. Immunity,
or the relentless drive to go back, go back, to run fast
to the below-wood refuge and wait out the summer nights, cold with luminescence.
I shut off the overhead light
and pull a sleep mask over my eyes. Come tomorrow
either the skunks will have gone away,
or they will remain here forever.
