Sweet

I was surprised by a large, luxurious skunk

This morning near the edge of the cliff.

Fortunately, I did not, in turn, surprise it.

I watched it foraging intently, sniffing,

Repeatedly shifting direction in the scrub,

Ignoring, it seemed, its precariousness

On a boulder hanging over the sheer cliff.

Wrens sang. Breezes made music of oaks.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop

Wandered through my awareness, poets

Dead not long before I knew their names,

Poets who wrote for each other. “Skunk

Hour, for Elizabeth Bishop,” for instance.

I will be dead myself, I think, long before

Anyone composes skunk poems for me.

Poor me. Alone on a stone with small birds

Singing to deep, sweet canyons of pines,

Watching an insouciant mustelid forage—

Who may not, geneticists suggest, belong

With all those weasels, otters, badgers, minks,

And wolverines, but alone, the sole Mephitid.