Robert Wood Lynn
Closing my car door, you always sayWatch
for deer and text when you get home.
I want to, I do, but I will forget.
Time moves and I forget.Look
I am trying, I am, but it's not the kind
of thing that trying solves.

Once
on the side of a highway, a cop told me
about dragging a full grown buck out
the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself.
About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning
what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked
to death in the driver's seat. The phone call
he had to make to her grown daughter after
whose first question was, Did the deer survive?

Different cop, different time, different highway.
Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke
about securing the crime scene in that classroom
in Blacksburg where the one student shot
all the others. Every single one of them
had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after
every single one rang and rang or vibrated
across the floor in the same slow way
that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer,
no one, so instead the phones rang all night
until batteries were empty, voicemails full
of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know
you're okays. Turns out time moves the way
blood does. Batteries too. Runs out
like a startled deer across a road.Listen
l am trying to find a way to tell you this.
There are things that trying solves but this
is not one of them.
from the book MOTHMAN APOLOGIA / Yale University Press
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A difficult but important part of poetry for me has always been to explore the ugliness of the world, and our relationship to it as people—how individual grief becomes collectivized and vice versa. Like so many, I spent April 16, 2007 trying to get ahold of friends and family in Blacksburg. It was strange, then, to learn later how our collective act of love and worry inadvertently traced a penumbra of loss.

Robert Wood Lynn on "About the Phones"
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