Julia Shipley
One day after work in winter, my lover leads me
to the porcupine ensconced in the hollow
of a standing cedar. The porcupine—
our region's urchin, grunts and snorts;
it's shifting. We hear his prickly scuffles within;
the midden of porcupine shit betrays his entrance
to board and residence, spilling
over the snow it forms a ramp to
where the creature's burrowed. I feel
the steepness of this: encroaching dusk,
quills of freezing air at my throat, ears.
Night has already filled in our boot prints; they look
like shit dropped on snow, leading up
to us. Somewhere, maybe here
in this strange air my lover rescinds
his courtship, so subtly I don't recognize
his drift until months after we witness this.
As we stand I'm secretly bleeding,
burrowed in the throes of
something immense, the way the porcupine
sways in his steeple of cedar and pieces of the cedar's
nibbled interior sleds among the animal's blood.