232 PA RT T W O
Now, it ’s all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nightsoverhearing the adults. Then mid-stanza, as if in dream vision,
—Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.The title has turned up, a bit threatening like Frost ’s “great buck” in “The Most
of It,” Ted Hughes’s huge old “Pike,” the snake whose “notice sudden is” for
Emily Dickinson.
It ’s taken twenty-three stanzas with as many hours journeying past sea, bay,
tide, mudflats, river, roads, farms, and lived-on landscape, plus their endear-
ing, enduring populace, to arrive at something unlooked-for. Rhyming “im-
penetrable wood” with “bus’s hot hood” doesn’t domesticate this wild critter
“Towering, antlerless, / high as a church, / homely as a house”—nor do those
likenings. The old folks’ country lingo,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It ’s awful plain.”
“Look! It ’s a she!”only heightens and distances the beast.
Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.Not so inhuman as Lawrence ’s “Snake” or Jeffers’s “Hurt Hawks”—after all,
she ’s a mammal, like us, and female.
Such surprise in the drowsing night. United now, “we” sense something
more:
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?Because the strange creature is grand yet homely, towering yet mild? Comes out
of the dark wild but stands right “in the middle of the road,” our road? Why