Skinning The Skunk Poem by gershon hepner

Once we’ve finished skinning our own skunk
with poetic words with which we’re drunk
and find that there is little more to tell
about the miserable, immortal smell
we turn to memories of wine and cheese
that we enjoyed when young, and from deep freeze
retrieve our recollections of a vanished past
to which we still are hooked, and break our fast
by thawing thoughts that seem too complicated
till verse makes us become intoxicated,
though not too drunk to hear the Munchian scream
with which we wake from our poetic dream.


Mark Ford reviews “Letters of Ted Hughes, ” edited by Christopher Reid (NYR, November 6,2008) . He quotes Hughes’ late poem in which he recalls a solitary trip to Paris made in 1954in which he recalls his younger self revel in the sense of the world being all before him:

…he’s sipping the first claret he
ever tasted, I know that,
And chewing his first Gruère. He
will spend the rest of his life
Trying to recapture the marvel—
Separately or combined—
Of that wine that cheese and this moment,
So new to his unlived life, so
ready for anything,
He could ever imagine, and can’t hear
The scream that approaches him

The Munchian, Eumenidean scream, as Ford puts it, come not only from Sylvia Plath and Assia Weevil, as he skins his own skunk, but from the poet himself.

11/1/08