July 30th, 2008
Teddy Macker
SYCAMORE CANYON
for Vaughn MontgomeryThe dead doe on the Pacific Coast Highway
was lying on her left side. She was almost
the same color as the dirt around her.
Whenever a car passed—it was Sunday
and people were driving the coast—
the fur on her neck would rise in the wind.
Her eyes were dry and cracked; they looked
like the skin of baked apples. They did not shine.
Her left hind leg was so broken it looked absurd.
A car must’ve hit. The doe defecated.
Windblown pebbles stuck to the shit.The hooves were dusty and large. They did not seem
like the hooves of something dead.
When I reached down and picked up a front leg
I could feel the clarity of her old running.
She made me nervous. I was afraid she would stand up
and come alive. How many cars will pass tonight,
I wondered, and make the fur on her neck rise?
It saddened me no one would be there
to document every time this happened,
that no one would say, There, look.
The fur on her neck, it’s rising in the wind.
–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Dare I say it? I think I like this poem better than William Stafford’s “deer poem” – Traveling Through the Dark – here’s the link if you want to compare the two poems:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/
~richie/poetry/html/poem185.html
I note that Stafford’s poem is in 4 quatrains and 1 couplet – and Macker’s is all one stanza – 22 lines (if I counted correctly – hey, it’s almost midnight here!) – i.e., sort of like 5 quatrains and and 1 couplet, all pushed together, if you want to look at it that way.
Well, I’m just rambling-analyzing (ramblyzing?) here – but the deer in Macker’s poem is so present in its death – the neck fur rising in the wind – and in Stafford’s poem, there’s more intellectual distance, more thinking.
While I’m on the subject of other poems – check out Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “deer poem” – Buck in the Snow -
http://www.bluffton.edu/courses
/tlc/bandishc/bbpoems/poem6.htm
Well, back to my own poem!
We were thinking the same thing when it came in, actually — it’s hard to publish another dead doe poem after Stafford, but heck if this one ain’t better than his!
I’ve never read the Millay… I think everyone’s got a deer poem. I’ve got one myself. Why is that? They represent a lot of things that are important to us, and dying, I think.