30,000 Miles, One Way (Groundhogs)

I’ve come to expect less:
the accidents
cleared to the shoulder,
the twisted masses of steel and plastic,
the flashing lights.
sirens,
the bodies carried off on stretchers
in the next lane over:
the line of brake-lights slowing,
tiny corpuscles
stretching into the distance of this clogged artery
where deer lay folded,
as if asleep,
their blood ticked across windshields,
or ground into the pavement like bruises,
the bright orange of fox fur
sending a sharp scent of decay
upwards to circling birds.

The groundhogs
watch from the sides of the parkway,
nibbling tender shoots,
as if laboring against this all
content merely to fatten themselves for their long sleep.

If I could stop
for one moment,
I would become them.

But instead
the need
the hunger
that is always there
pushes me up and down this same grey strip of pavement
in this tiny metal box,
bald tires,
the side mirror knocked off by the plow,
the engine misfiring,
a tiny vessel,
a clot waiting to gum up the works.

-© Simo-Skunk, 2014