Moonlight: Chickens On The Road

Called out of dream by the pitch and screech,   

I awoke to see my mother’s hair

set free of its pincurls, springing out

into the still and hurtling air

above the front seat and just as suddenly gone.   

The space around us twisted,

and in the instant before the crash

I heard the bubbling of the chickens,

the homely racket they make at all speeds,   

signifying calm, resignation, oblivion.

And I listened. All through the slash

and clatter, the rake of steel, shatter of glass,   

I listened, and what came

was a blizzard moan in the wind, a wail   

of wreckage, severed hoses and lives,

a storm of loose feathers, and in the final   

whirl approximating calm, the cluck   

and fracas of the birds. I crawled

on hands and knees where a window should   

have been and rose uneven

in November dusk. Wind blew

a snow of down, and rows of it quivered along   

the shoulder. One thin stream of blood

oozed, flocked in feathers.

This was in the Ozarks, on a road curving miles   

around Missouri, and as far as I could

see, no light flickered through the timber,   

no mail box leaned the flag

of itself toward pavement, no cars

seemed ever likely to come along.

So I walked, circled the darkening disaster   

my life had come to, and cried.

I cried for my family there,

knotted in the snarl of metal and glass;   

for the farmer, looking dead, half in

and half out of his windshield; and for myself,   

ambling barefoot through the jeweled debris,   

glass slitting little blood-stars in my soles,   

my arm hung loose at the elbow

and whispering its prophecies of pain.

Around and around the tilted car

and the steaming truck, around the heap

of exploded crates, the smears and small hunks   

of chicken and straw. Through

an hour of loneliness and fear

I walked, in the almost black of Ozark night,   

the moon just now burning into Missouri. Behind me,   

the chickens followed my lead,

some fully upright, pecking

the dim pavement for suet or seed,

some half-hobbled by their wounds, worthless wings   

fluttering in the effort. The faintest

light turned their feathers phosphorescent,

and as I watched they came on, as though they believed   

me some savior, some highwayman

or commando come to save them the last night   

of their clucking lives. This, they must have

believed, was the end they’d always heard of,

this the rendering more efficient than the axe,

the execution more anonymous than

a wringing arm. I walked on, no longer crying,

and soon the amiable and distracted chattering came   

again, a sound like chuckling, or the backward suck   

of hard laughter. And we walked   

to the cadence their clucking called,   

a small boy towing a cloud around a scene   

of death, coming round and round   

like a dream, or a mountain road,   

like a pincurl, like pulse, like life.


~ Robert Wrigley


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