Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh—
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state—

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

           The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs
Sloppy after that, our need for one another
Greedy, weak.
from the bookHERE: POEMS FOR THE PLANET/ Copper Canyon
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Head shot of Shane McCrae

In the New Yorker poetry podcast, Shane McCrae talks to Kevin Young about his poetry sequence, "Jim Limber in Heaven." "The main fact about the book is that each Jim Limber is a different Jim Limber because it's a heaven that is part of a multiverse. And so....it's a multi heaven. There's a lot of different heavens. And so each speaker, each Jim Limber is slightly different."

via THE NEW YORKER
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What Sparks Poetry:
Vahni Capildeo on Martin Carter’s “This Is the Dark Time My Love”

“When did you—when does anyone—start writing poetry; or, when would you call the things, the scribbles, the utterances that you make or break, 'poetry?' When they are very young, a lot of people make up rhymes, or become attached to reciting mundane or magical-seeming phrases. Children may take pleasure in exclamations, swear words, and other fragments collaged from the grown-up world of overheard speech. If those contain the early sparks of poetry, for many Caribbean readers Martin Carter is a contributor to the flame."
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