Robert Wrigley: Elk

His hindquarters must have fallen through
the ice, and he could not pull himself back out
and the incoming colder weather
refroze the hole around him and he died,
sinking some, only his broad horns
holding his head and neck above the surface.
Soon he must have been discovered by coyotes,
who ate all they could. His face, that is,
the soft, perhaps just frozen, cheeks and muzzle,
his tongue, which would have protruded
from his open dying mouth, the eyes,
then the opening of the throat, the coyotes'
prints visible only in the sheen of blood
around the snowless black surface of the lake.
Such cold this early in the winter, autumn really,
still early December, has surprised us all.
Since snow is at last forecast this afternoon,
I have come to skate, half a mile from shore
when I see him, or see what's left,
and reconstruct the narrative of his demise.
The coyotes ignored his spraddled forelegs,
hoof prints still born down against the pull
of his back half. A six-point bull elk,
some abrasions on the surface of the ice
where the horns thrashed but held him.
A half-mile skate back to where I hung my boots
from a limb, a hundred yard walk from there
to the truck, in which I keep a bow saw,
which I could use to remove a wedge of pate
with the perfect rack, but I choose not to.
Something in the weariness of the bones
of his jaw, also the snow just now beginning.
Given the altitude here, he'll be completely covered
in a month, and at break-up, late March
or early April, he will sink as he did not
yesterday or the day before, and the bones
and the horns of him will settle to the bottom.
Although the coyotes may be back tonight,
to dig their way from the horns' stumps
for the ears, which I notice are still whole and upright,
the left one turned slightly farther left,
as though, with the last of his miraculous
senses, he heard them coming over the ice.



Published 2015. A gruelling poem that raises the question of how much confrontational honesty spills into sensationalism. I don't think it does in this case, because the poet has (presumably) seen this and is reporting on what he's seen. But there's an inner agitation beneath the poem's flatness, that surfaces in the defensive artificiality of the line "and reconstruct the narrative of his demise" and the fanciful image of the elk's ear turned to hear his devourers coming over the ice.