The great divide

Ahead of me was the beaten body of the deer,

its tan legs splayed out across the painted centre line.

To my right the car ticked over patiently

and beyond it, dancing above the yellow of the plains,

Montana rose and fell, its lung-beats green

and long since calcified.

I must have torn one of its arteries

to make it give up so much blood,

which now, finding grooves and channels in the road,

rolled down to pool

by a trailhead information stand,

which taught in flat municipal tones

the song of the great divide.

How explorers

edged towards it in canoes

watching for movement in the peaks,

how geologists, cartographers,

swarmed after them

writing out this gorgeous hydrologic fact

for the always-evening stillness of their libraries.

How years later, through the silence of Montana afternoons,

struck the lonesome, rigid steps,

of rangers planting signs.

But no one teaches this –

when you hit a deer on the great divide

and have to move the body off the road,

which side do you move it to?

To the east, so that its blood runs long and slow

into the tar-slicked Texan Gulf,

or to the west, to tumble through the mountain waters

of the Blackfoot,

Clark-Fork and Columbia,

to be slung back by the mad Pacific

and turned to foam

against the lowest cliff-hugging branches

of some Oregon state park?

And nobody prepared me for that electric fear

as I approached the body

and moved my hands towards its legs,

scared that this once lithe uncertain thing

might flinch.

Then, as my fingers tightened round it, guilt

came tumbling back

to swill around my belly

that this was all because of me,

that instead of being a machine

like this animal deserved

and braking when I could have stopped in time,

my wild heart was on another continent

thinking of a girl in London

where the bus-bombed city

wears the ghost of oceans like a hat.