Highway Murder

The poem ‘’Highway 12, Just East of Paradise, Idaho’’ by ‘’Robert Wrigley’’ irritated me in the extent that the author was detailed in the way the truck hit the deer on impact. I can understand the author’s purpose of this, but having an overly imaginative imagination made it uncomfortable for me to read it and go in depth with it.  The way the author detailed the doe getting hit by the truck and having ‘’her tongue extend and her eyes go and her eyes go shock and vacant.’’ Made me think too vividly of how the deer possibly looked when it got hit. It’s mostly sad to read about animals getting hurt or killed for that matter in poems or any kind of read, which is mainly why I have a negative view about this. I have no complaints about the poem and I understand it perfectly. The only aspect is that it was kind of bothersome for me to read.

On the other hand, it was interesting yet kind of weird how the author was able to see the impact of the doe so perfectly even though there were no lights on the road. The author also could have been in the driver’s seat and was driving while he saw the impact, which would have been slightly difficult since he was focused on the road rather than anything getting hit in front of him. ‘’For which, I admit, I was grateful, the road there being dark, narrow, and shoulderless…’’. It’s understandable that the light from the truck hitting the doe made it easy to see the impact slightly to see what had happened with the doe, but it is still kind of odd. Maybe it was such a fast impact that the author did not even know what was happening until after the author had driven off from the scene, and happened to remember everything so perfectly and vividly while he was driving home? It also sounds disturbing how the author describes the doe as ‘’she skidded along the right lane’s fog line true to as a cue ball, until her neck caught a sign post that spun her across both lanes and out of sight beyond the edge.’’ The doe’s neck hitting the sign post sent chills down my spine since due to the fact that I can imagine the doe’s neck making a noise against the sign post as she made a turn, making it seem like it hurt the doe to some extent, even though she was dead. It is also easy to imagine the doe falling off a cliff or just lying dead on the floor, which makes it more disturbing to me, since it was just witnessed that a doe got hit by a truck that had shock-stricken eyes and did a turn to where she hit a sign post with her neck.

The poem itself is understandable that a doe got hit on impact and the driver (in this case, the author) witnessed it and described in some detail as to what had happened to the doe. But, it is still kind of a disturbing read, especially if the reader has an overly imaginative imagination. It is just kind of hard to understand as to why the author wrote a poem about how a doe got hit by a truck while on a drive home and wrote in detail as to what happened to her.