Memory on Ashby Road, Quinby, SC

Did I kill the great hog long ago? I have made it so, but only know the story in the air and not with the blood of real memory. And there are others, not killed but done to, or gone through as panes of glass, deep water, blackberry hindrances spat up along the road, some real—after my heifer, the county’s best leaper of barbed wire and garden fences, got out, and I pursued her down Lower Third Brook Road, where the deer came through the early A.M. mist ahead of us, a weight that rang dumb luck—it missed us by a foot. But back again to what comes through true or as they call it real. I am never sure and the telling puts it out there, if done and done again, as the thing itself. And life becomes, as it does so easily for me, another occurrence of raccoon, dead in the center of Ashby Road, recognizable in the first sighting, then always known there. Again can be forever, even in the steady fading, flattening, loss of color, approaching the macadam’s dark, but distinct in extended, much road-rendered, two dimensions, holding shape, as I make my daily left-hand turn it is there, will always be there. I know this is memory, the kind of memory I want because the shape doesn’t change even once, indistinguishable from the dark road. Bone, gristle, fur, and long ago all inward organs dried by the assaults of truck wheels, the large lumber trucks for the mill, and my wheels, too, although I by-pass, to hold the idea, no, the real thing of it always, the shape ever in my eye, the darkening patch it is. And I move beyond the real spot, the first sighting. It is not that this ever was raccoon, dead in the road, another night, another thud in the anonymous stretch through Quinby. 

Helen Stevens Chinitz (who goes by Steevie), won The Omnidawn Poem Broadside (2022) contest for “Why I Am Not a Painter.” A finalist for the 2022 Steve Kowit Prize, she has poems in the Smoky Quartz Anthology, About Place, One Art, Southern Poetry Review, and The Westchester Review. After working is schools around the country, she escaped briefly for an MFA (2017). She lives deep in the Catskills, where she is comforted by her library, her Labrador, and light farming.

A Song for Steevie