March 3, 2016The WreckMike Catalano

It happened with such surgical precision

before sunup on the Eisenhower Highway

that no amount of precaution could separate

car metal from deer bone at high speeds.

And yes, there were flashback enactments

of past wrecks and busted vows.

But here, hundreds of miles from friends,

I rolled over on glassy, metallic fragments

as if they were transplanted shrapnel.

I knew my femur and fibula were fractured.

Perhaps it was the potion of pain and snow

that brought me back to grade school

where bullies dunked me again and again

into an icy vat. No amount of begging then

or meditation now could undo that combustion

of terror and anger. The buck, whose truncated

torso was mere centimeters from mine,

nodded, as if the guns and traps of his day

made us blood brothers rather than enemy species.

Then, with a denouement more than an ending,

the hand of God separated the skies,

shoving aside the sleet and the wind.

Help came quickly enough for me. I couldn’t

say the same for Buck whose blood

ran like rivulets over me. Perhaps I was

the aborted sacrifice, redeemed like Isaac.

It took me a year to walk again.

Maybe we really are no different, brute beasts

at best. Or just maybe I finally forgave

my tormentors, forty years too late.