Just off the trail
among the quills of the birches
the porcupine had settled, comfortably
into its final business.
It looked like a fur hat
abandoned in the snow melt
a little mound of treachery
its white-tipped needles raked back
to its bristly, club-
handled, still-lethal tail.
It was clear the porcupine was up to something.
I knew he was dead and yet
his stillness kept a strange avidity.
Like a bullet in a chamber
or a fortress challenging the air
secretly, under his defences,
