Borrowed Form in "Raccoon Journal"

Until I listened to Greg Pape's lecture on analogue poetry, I had never really thought about the technique of borrowing a poem' s form from some other communications pattern. But Stanley Kunitz was thinking of just that when he borrowed the form of the naturalist's log notes for "Raccoon Journal." Stretching imaginatively over four months, the narrator chronicles the nocturnal visits of a family of five raccoons to town.

Starting with a dictionary definition, a technique that the analogue suggests, the narrator explains the meaning of the Algonquian Indian word from which the name raccoon comes--"he scratches with his hands." And with this definition, the narrator establishes the major motif used in the poem.

Raccoon actions are described with hand metaphors, metaphors that do what human hands are capable of doing. They "drop a calling card," open garbage cans, "scatter parts of chickens," drown a neighbor's dog, and they "dig, dig, dig" for the bonemeal and hook their "prehensile fingers" to the screen door. They've come to town "to inspect their properties" and finally to "take possession." The narrator's sense of their taking things into their own hands is woven through the poem as is the sense of these animals as prehensile beings, beings that can not only grasp things but ideas, beings that understand the meaning of ownership.

This gradual development of the hand motif moves from the innocent, the charming, to the insidious and stops just short of dangerous. At first the notion of coming to "inspect their properties" is humorous with their "swagger," nosiness, and precocity, and even the juxtaposition of "calling card" and "soft reddish scats" is the stuff of the country-come-to-town American jokester. The figure of "heavy sprays of territorial scent" mixing with the dew of the damp morning air suggests the ominous meaning that will later be revealed in the poem.

The image of "five pelts" seen by streetlight "paddling" up the lane promises a child's delightful story of teddy bear arrival until the garbage cans are plundered and a pet is lured to death. The bear-like lovability turns to a "grizzly old codger" with arms and hands that drag the Labrador retriever into the water and hold him under. In the last entry, the bear-like creatures are heard "half-churring, half-growling." They "lumber from side to side like diminished bears in a flatfooted shuffle." They have "snouts," "bandit eyes," and their "manic hoot….curdles the night air." They are shape-shifters, "libidinous beasts [that] assume familiar shapes."

They are monsters connected with "ooze" where they drown dogs. Describing them as "five pelts" and later as a "furpiece" hanging on the screen door runs counter to the urge to anthropomorphize and builds the mystery voiced in the indefinite "Something out there appalls." The raccoons are characterized as hedonists that live "promiscuously," "gorge" on the bounty of the garbage can, and are addicts wild for bonemeal, "a whiff of buried angel dust."

The narrator places himself with those on "this side of Gull Hill" who can no longer tangle with the lawlessness of the raccoons, those like his "superannuated cat" who can only put "on a show of bristling" at the mouse "racing round the kitchen. He is resigned to "paying [his] vegetable tithe" and coming to terms with the "wilderness of age," no longer able "to talk with animals in their own language." This self-referential section of the poem is tied to the ending where the animals no longer need be afraid of the man. The final line "they've come to take possession" suggests far more than it states. The raccoons morph into all those who have come to take the man's life into their own hands, all that threatens just outside the door of remember vitality.