The Skunk - Analysis

Desire Renewed by Distance

The poem presents marital desire as something recovered through estrangement, watching, and imaginative substitution. Alone in California, the speaker waits for a skunk, but his fascination with the animal gradually reveals his longing for his absent wife. The comparison is deliberately strange: the wife is not idealized into a conventionally graceful creature, nor is the skunk merely comic. Instead, both become ordinary, mysterious presences whose familiar bodies retain the power to surprise. By the end, the skunk has taught the speaker how to see his wife again—not as the abstract category of wife, but as a particular, physical, unknowable woman.

The Funeral Vestment and the Raised Tail

The opening makes the skunk simultaneously ceremonial and animal. Its raised, striped tail resembles the chasuble worn at a funeral mass, bringing Catholic solemnity into an encounter with a nocturnal scavenger. The comparison gives the skunk dignity, but the dignity remains slightly absurd: it is the tail that paraded the skunk, as if this flamboyant part were displaying the whole creature. Even demasked carries a contradiction. The skunk is unmistakably revealed by its markings, yet it remains a disguised, theatrical visitor.

The funeral reference also places absence and loss around the encounter. No one has literally died, but separation has made the speaker’s marriage feel temporarily deprived of bodily life. Against that emotional vacancy, the skunk appears night after night, and he expects her like a visitor. The feminine pronoun quietly prepares the later connection with his wife. His waiting is already charged with desire before he fully acknowledges what he is waiting for.

California as a Room of Suspended Senses

The setting is hushed but not peaceful. The refrigerator whinnied into silence, turning an ordinary appliance briefly into an animal before stillness closes over it. Beyond the softened desk light, small oranges loomed; the fruit is physically small yet psychologically enlarged by solitude and expectation. The speaker’s attention has become intensely receptive, making every sound, smell, and movement significant.

That heightened attention makes him tense as a voyeur. The word introduces an uneasy tension between loving observation and illicit watching. He is not simply enjoying wildlife: he is waiting in darkness to look at a female creature that does not know she is being watched. Yet the skunk remains beyond him, five feet away, intent on its own purposes. The speaker’s gaze cannot possess it. That small distance anticipates the poem’s treatment of marriage: intimacy does not abolish separateness, and desire may depend on recognizing that the other person has a life beyond one’s gaze.

Broaching the Word Wife

The emotional center arrives when the speaker admits that, after eleven years, he is writing love letters again. The phrase implies that courtship language has been dormant during marriage. He is broaching the ‘wife’ like a stored cask: the word has been sealed up by habit, but separation opens it and releases something concentrated. The image is affectionate and faintly self-critical. He has perhaps allowed the role of wife to replace the vivid person whom he once addressed as a lover.

The quotation marks around wife make the term sound examined rather than automatic. Even its slender vowel seems to expand into California’s night earth and air. Language, landscape, and longing merge because his wife is absent from the place itself. The eucalyptus has a beautiful, useless tang: beautiful because it sharpens sensation, useless because it cannot give him the person he wants. Likewise, the taste left after wine becomes inhaling you from a cold pillow. The image is intimate but desolate. Smell can summon her presence, yet the pillow’s coldness insists that she is not there.

Myth Made and Unmade

When the skunk finally appears, it is intent and glamorous but also ordinary. The paired terms mythologized, demythologized name the poem’s central movement. Longing turns the creature into an emblem of erotic mystery; close observation returns it to a skunk sniffing boards. Neither perception cancels the other. Its glamour lies precisely in the fact that this commonplace animal remains self-contained, purposeful, and resistant to sentimental transformation.

The same is true of the wife. The speaker’s love does not require her to remain a distant ideal, but neither does domestic familiarity exhaust her mystery. The poem risks making her into an animal under a male gaze, yet the comparison is more reciprocal than reductive: the skunk gains glamour and dignity, while the wife regains the strangeness that habitual marital language had stored away. Both are seen in absorbed, independent action rather than posing for him.

The Black Nightdress in the Drawer

The final scene completes the association with affectionate erotic comedy. The California memory returns as the wife undresses, her belongings falling in a sootfall at bedtime. As she searches a drawer head-down, tail-up, her posture recalls the foraging skunk. The black plunge-line nightdress adds both the skunk’s dark coloration and a sudden erotic charge. Yet she is doing something entirely ordinary: rummaging for clothes.

This closing image transforms the earlier voyeurism. The speaker is no longer peering from a lonely desk at an inaccessible visitor; he is watching the familiar motions of a shared bedroom. Still, the wife remains intent on her own search, just as the skunk was intent on sniffing the boards. The tone shifts from isolation and sensory hunger to playful, embodied tenderness. What has returned is not merely a memory of California, but the capacity to perceive glamour inside domestic habit. The poem’s deepest claim is that lasting intimacy depends on this double vision: seeing the beloved as intimately known and still irreducibly strange.