Jo Ann Clark

Humane

The woodchuck back
at her misnamed work
undermining the stone
base of the house I live in
can’t be the same rodent
who savaged once
the garden of the mother
of my first love. Bookish
boy who then took aim
from an attic sash
pried open for the task,
gun barrel steadied
in the dust on the sill,
his shot so merciless
and true that its pellet
sailed above the rise
by the pond-lily pond,
past its lone heron
and marginalia of frogs,
to find the busy, pelt-brown
patch just visible in a row
of runner beans.
From such distance,
it appeared—appears
somehow still—to have left
the now-motionless thing
unharmed. Yet in righteousness
and self-disgust like that
the boy and I felt burying
the chuck’s small carcass—
matted and black
with its own wet blood—
I call a trap-and-release
service that, for a price
I’ll pay off in installments,
conjures wildernesses.

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Translator, essayist and poet Jo Ann Clark is author of the collection 1001 Facts of Prehistoric Life (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, Paris Review, Boston Review, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. A native Alabaman who grew up foremost in Alaska and Maine, she is also a teacher and non-profit administer whose international career has taken her to Italy, China and Hong Kong. She lives in the Hudson River valley.