Ellis Purdie

Elegy for a Biologist

You said you’d love to have a gray fox
skull, taught me about the sagittal crest
running its cap, differentiating it from its
red brethren, and I find it hard to believe,
in all your work of honoring carcass, you
never found one dead in the road. Maybe
you did, a specimen too broken to keep.

It is common to bury a body with objects,
a note slipped between a rigid thumb
and pointer, a medal around a marathon
runner’s neck, that time I placed a guitar
pick on my friend’s chest who spent hours
learning Slayer, lying handsome dressed
for church, band t-shirts folded at home. 

I consider my own casket, books I would
take, my snake hook, more valuable still
what you said about vireos, their moving
within the middle limbs of a copse, or if
I could, the gray fox skull I would cradle
in the crook of my arm, hold in my hand
and hand to you, should we wake again.

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Ellis Purdie graduated from The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reformed Journal, jmww, San Pedro River Review, Puerto Del Sol, Talking River Review and Cottonwood. He lives with his family in east Texas, where he is often looking for wildlife.