Burning Bridges Like Matchsticks

I took an AP English class my senior year in high school. There was a poem in our textbook about roadkill that I remember paging past. Something in it caught my eye, and I read it and liked it. Not enough to copy it down, though. But ever since then, I've regretted that decision. It's hard to find things when you don't know the title, the author, or anything other than a general outline of the story. And yet...

Burying an Animal on the Way to New York
Gerald Stern

Don't flinch when you come across a dead animal lying on the road;
you are being shown the secret of life.
Drive slowly over the brown flesh;
you are helping to bury it.
If you are the last mourner there will be no caress
at all from the crushed limbs
and you will have to slide over the dark spot imagining
the first suffering all by yourself
Shreds of spirit and little ghost fragments will be spread out
for two miles above the white highway.
Slow down with your radio off and your windows open
to hear the twittering as you go by.

The Internet. Connecting roadkill poems and morbid tree-huggers since 1973.