HEAVEN’S ROADKILL: The Boonedoggle-n-Crockett-of-Shit-Club

Long before I ever squeezed the trigger for real,
became predator and truly believed it
a heaven-given rite of pubescent passage
to hit the bars, pursue trophy women, toss
back record-book numbers of shots
and beers, long before every Saturday night
mimicked the opening morning of big game
hunting season—heartthrob of rural
small towns surrounded by the wooded
homes of our animal brethren
over whom, the bible rules, man shall Lord
his dominion—long before I turned
manly in Antlered-Tavern, America,
I slept with a bedful of stuffed animals,
with a Smokey-The-Bear doll
decked out in his Montana Peak ranger hat,
trousers with galluses, and belt buckle embossed
with his name.
                      Forty-five years later,
long after confessing my predatory sins,
giving up rifles and Saturday night
rituals in wild bars, after biting hard my lip
to keep from weeping a child’s tears
beside the grave of the first real Smokey
The Bear in El Capitan, New Mexico,
another cub, Burnie, survives
the Bitterroot Forest fires, summer of 2000,
stirring up in us the anthropomorphic embers
never lying dormant for long, warming
what little is left of the soul
just beneath the smoldering soil.
                                                 Delivered from evil,
his paws scorched, Burnie graces us
with yet one more last chance to showcase
our newsworthy pathos, our knack
for doing some godly good. We swaddle his paws,
nurse Burnie’s wounds through months
of painful oozings back to first tender steps
into a soothing coolness. We lay him down
to sleep out the winter with fellow bruin
snoozers. Come April, we celebrate his
reunion with the wilds, his playful
traipsings cued by so little instinct
into October, into open season, into open
rifle sights that frame all eighty pounds
of  his life into a week’s worth of meat
and bear cub rug—lustrous
teeth reflecting the ferocious
hopelessness preying on us all.