Kurt Luchs

Dead Snapping Turtle

I brake for the living,
not often for the dead,
but I’ll always make an exception
for a snapping turtle.
This one was on Route 131 as I was
heading north from my workplace
in the lefthand lane.
As soon as I saw her
I pulled off the road
just ahead of where she lay 
in the breakdown lane,
first to make sure
she was out of pain, and second
to give her the respect
that the driver who killed her did not.
I say “her” because the female snapper
has shorter nails than the male.
The last male she met had left her
with a bellyful of eggs
conceived in the honeymoon suite
of the swamp and needing now
to be laid in dryer, sandier soil.
The last mistake she made
was trying to cross the highway
from east to west without
birdwings or fleet mammal feet.
Biting is the only thing 
a snapping turtle does quickly. 
She might have been clipped by a truck
carrying milk for America’s young,
or perhaps a compact car driven
by a woman on her way
to meet with her obstetrician.
The turtle’s sharp-ridged shell was riven
in two places, her neck broken,
her eight-pointed star eyes open in death
and already the flies were using her
for their personal hatchery.
No matter what death does
everything else in this world
is frantically trying to get born.
I picked her up by the tail
and carried her to the other side
of the road, that much closer
to her goal, where I laid her
in the grass beyond the gravel,
a makeshift graveyard gift
from a distant human cousin
hurrying home.

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