He might’ve been thinking himself invincible.
The glassy night, a hedgehog, hedging its bets

as he drove past Happy Gardens Chinese Take Out,
a thump intruded his thoughts, so 

he slowed, backed up, saw the doe’s writhing mid-road, 
her head arched as though taking account 

of what happened
her hindquarters no longer moveable,

her brain perhaps racing for some explanation 
why the body
 
won’t lift, then, only, slowly, she perhaps realized 
her own dying—

the two-legged beings she feared 
swooping down,

horrific angels in the happy garden of life,
one man pulling her front legs 

to wiggle her curbside,
away from further harm, but what further harm 

can arrive, tongue dripping from her mouth? 
And the man who steered his Honda
 
Element turns away, the unexplained taking its swipe. 
He’ll drive, eyes open, back into the silver light
 
which cautiously threads a road home 
and that now seems endless.
                        

A write-up’s no tropical invitation.
It’s deployment, possibly the hole.

The hole is the end-all of entrapment.
No privileges or packages 

passed out there, no celadon bowls 
filled with fresh fruit.

		*

Poetry becomes a fleeting vessel 
that sometimes frees my writers.

I know because I watched a poem 
on the fly. It landed in water, 

transformed a cigarette butt into a boat
and was carried past electrified fences.

		*

To hold a poem in your hand 
is to hold God in the palm.
—A palm is not a psalm, but it could be.

		*

A handful of men become angels;
no yard fights, no exchanges of contraband, 
no depressive isolation.

In the silence of themselves 
they occasionally find themselves.

Sometimes, only rarely, a poem frees them.