SPACIOUS SKIES - After HL Van Brunt

In 1974, a poet named HL Van Brunt came to my high school. It was, for me, the only moment in high school that really mattered (except when Mr. Meixell was lecturing on MacBeth). Van Brunt was a strange poet who seemed to have stepped out of Hades. He read a poem about driving through roadkill, and helping to bury animal carcasses. Recently I bought every volume of his poems, and couldn't find this poem. Does anyone else remember this man and his poems? I tried to reconstitute his poem, based not so much on memory but what I think it should have been.

As I drive Route Ten toward Stamford, the

skunks, deer, crows, opossum, bear, and God 

knows what, clog the arterial.

They give me paws, as I travel beside the Delaware.

I could wait for the highway safety patrol to

remove their carcasses, and that would mean

steering around the cadavres, but

I wish to help nature along its course,

so I drove right through their spines,

snapping their gizzards, helping to turn

what’s black and white and red all over,

into yesterday’s news.