Vanishing - Elizabeth Herron

[Larry Robinson]

Vanishing



The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered. - Paul Shepard


Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
of insects, the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles, coyote scat
in the crook of her knee --

the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung 
red with madrone berries, 
pale pits pearling through. 
She noses the foreleg
where scraps of hide cling to bone.

Imagine the first flick of tail, 
ripple of skin under summer flies, 
and how this fawn died. 
The woods are full of stories
in rotting trunks, cool shadows 
and bones like these, whitened 
by winters she hadn’t seen. 

But what of her stays with me? 
Days later in my lumpy green chair 
by the window, cat curved 
around my feet on the ottoman,
the dog denned under the table,
teacup on the sill, and I think

of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot, ballooning 
beside blood slicked fur.

Will the silence of their absence rise
above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
stumble through strip malls and suburbs
looking for lost meadows, jostle 
at the on-ramps distracting drivers 
with a sudden vague unease?

Will our grief surprise us?
Will we wonder at our loneliness?


	- Elizabeth Herron


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