The Skunk
The Skunk - meaning Summary
Absence Made Visible
The poem links the speaker's separation from his wife to the nightly appearance of a skunk outside his California home. Watching the animal becomes a way of feeling absence, desire, and memory at once. The ordinary creature is both comical and charged with longing, and the poem ends by folding the animal's image into the wife's remembered movement at bedtime.
Read Complete AnalysesUp, black, striped and demasked like the chasuble At a funeral mass, the skunk’s tail Paraded the skunk. Night after night I expected her like a visitor. The refrigerator whinnied into silence. My desk light softened beyond the verandah. Small oranges loomed in the orange tree. I began to be tense as a voyeur. After eleven years I was composing Love-letters again, broaching the ‘wife’ Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowel Had mutated into the night earth and air Of California. The beautiful, useless Tang of eucalyptus spelt your absence. The aftermath of a mouthful of wine Was like inhaling you off a cold pillow. And there she was, the intent and glamorous, Ordinary, mysterious skunk, Mythologized, demythologized, Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me. It all came back to me last night, stirred By the sootfall of your things at bedtime, Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer For the black plunge-line nightdress.
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