April 2018
Note: In warmer months, as one who lives virtually on the shore of the Connecticut River, pretty much unspoiled in northern Vermont, I spend a lot of time with a paddle, either one- or two-bladed, in my grip. I train for couple or three flat-water kayak races every summer, and, as this poem recounts, I was doing just that when I came upon a ravaged deer, hock-deep in the shallows.
There is a part of me that loathes the poet's tendency, MY tendency, to use other creatures' woes as cues. This poem is all about the futile effort on my part to resist that bent, and about how I can invent whatever I want, literal truth be damned, for my poetic ends.
There is a part of me that loathes the poet's tendency, MY tendency, to use other creatures' woes as cues. This poem is all about the futile effort on my part to resist that bent, and about how I can invent whatever I want, literal truth be damned, for my poetic ends.
Poetic License
She appeared to be standing hock-deep in a cove,
her eyes on each flash of my blade.
I paddled in for the thrill of watching a wild thing’s flight.
When the doe didn’t run, I concluded she couldn’t,
and circled to view the ruined hindquarters,
the entrails that fluttered like pennants in slow-moving water.
She wasn’t standing at all,
but knelt in the gloom of ash and cottonwood shade.
I returned to the launch and started over,
intent on a personal best
to the bridge upstream and back in the light,
long kayak I use whenever I race.
At my age, of course, time itself
is my real competition. I stared away from the cove
as I passed again, yet resist as I might,
I felt off-course, not because of the fate of the doe,
which I knew to be common, or at least scarcely tragic,
except as the sentimental apply the term.
Not that I didn’t hope the coyote
would come back to end the deer’s struggle,
or that she’d weaken and drown
before I came back myself from upriver.
But my true distraction lay in thinking a poem
might be struggling its way to the front despite my desires.
I’m strong, if I say so, at least for my age.
And if I hadn’t drifted ever so briefly
to see her still kneeling, I’d surely have made my best time yet.
Not strong enough after all to stay honest, I felt
old art prevailing. (Pardon my precious diction.)
How fitting if sunlight could turn to rain,
I thought. It didn’t, but that hardly mattered.
I had license to choose from a store of old lies,
full access, then, to a whole range of skies.
Poetic License
She appeared to be standing hock-deep in a cove,
her eyes on each flash of my blade.
I paddled in for the thrill of watching a wild thing’s flight.
When the doe didn’t run, I concluded she couldn’t,
and circled to view the ruined hindquarters,
the entrails that fluttered like pennants in slow-moving water.
She wasn’t standing at all,
but knelt in the gloom of ash and cottonwood shade.
I returned to the launch and started over,
intent on a personal best
to the bridge upstream and back in the light,
long kayak I use whenever I race.
At my age, of course, time itself
is my real competition. I stared away from the cove
as I passed again, yet resist as I might,
I felt off-course, not because of the fate of the doe,
which I knew to be common, or at least scarcely tragic,
except as the sentimental apply the term.
Not that I didn’t hope the coyote
would come back to end the deer’s struggle,
or that she’d weaken and drown
before I came back myself from upriver.
But my true distraction lay in thinking a poem
might be struggling its way to the front despite my desires.
I’m strong, if I say so, at least for my age.
And if I hadn’t drifted ever so briefly
to see her still kneeling, I’d surely have made my best time yet.
Not strong enough after all to stay honest, I felt
old art prevailing. (Pardon my precious diction.)
How fitting if sunlight could turn to rain,
I thought. It didn’t, but that hardly mattered.
I had license to choose from a store of old lies,
full access, then, to a whole range of skies.
© 2018 Sydney Lea
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