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Skunk
Night brims with his bittersweet.
Sometimes a squashed body does it: for miles
The highway blows his grief among the trees.
Other times it's fear that burns that incense
In the dark. Or it could be just delight:
Two of them finding one another
Slow and curious
Among moist ferns and cool bluegreen shadows.
Black and white, warm as saliva,
Infinitely, as such things go, desirable.
Making no secret of what's between them,
They hang their lavish presence on the night,
Scattering anarchy in pungent waves
Through the dark beyond our bedroom window.
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Eamon Grennan, a Dubliner, taught for many years at Vassar College. He has published (in Ireland and the U.S.) over ten volumes of poetry. Recent collections are Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf); and There Now (Graywolf, and Gallery, Ireland), and Plainchant (Gallery, 2020, and Red Hen Press, forthcoming, 2022). Still Life with Waterfall (Graywolf) won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He has translated the poems of Leopardi (Princeton University Press, winner of the PEN award in translation) He has also co-translated (with his partner, Rachel Kitzinger) Oedipus at Colonus (Oxford), and The Women of Trachis (Lever Press). Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century is a collection of critical essays. In the past few years he has been writing and directing “plays for voices” on Irish historical and literary subject matter for a small Irish theatre group—Curlew Theatre Company. He lives in Poughkeepsie and in Connemara.
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Loudon Wainwright III: "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road"