Skunk Hour

Sleep, Interrupted

Fall is here, and the weather is about to turn. Last night was still mild, so Sam and I slept with the window open. While falling asleep, I thought about the sweetness of living in place where the sounds and smells of the night, waning cicadas and the breeze moving through the trees, carrying those first traces of autumn, might lull me to into oblivion.

Several hours later I was wakened by a skunk spraying what had to be directly beneath my aforementioned open window. The odor was sharp. I’m talking clean out your nostrils, make your eyes tear up sharp. Charlie, sleeping between me and Sam, did his best to bury his nose under my pillow. It took perhaps an hour for the smell to dissipate, an hour during which I lay awake.

               During this sleepless hour, I considered the source. I thought about animals, specifically, the dog at my side and the defensive skunk outside, the red fox that brazenly crosses in front of me during my morning run, the chipmunks running rip shod through our garden’s hasta. Then, my thoughts turned to “Skunk Hour,” a poem I’d read in college. It’s by Robert Lowell, and has a line, “my mind is not right,” which hit me hard, it’s so simple, sad, desperate. At the end, Lowell stands on the back steps of his house in Maine to “breathe the rich air”—“/a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail/She jabs her wedge-head in a cup/of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, /and will not scare.”

Eventually, I fell back to sleep, after passing a Skunk Hour not remotely like Lowell’s; no visible skunk, no dark ruminations, happy to cede the hour to wakefulness. My mind was right, or at least, not not right, and the skunk absolutely did scare. Leaving the window open allowed it all; the smell waking me to drift gently through my musings, finally coming to rest on a poem long forgotten and newly relevant, all blessing, and no curse.