Deer at Twilight
Darkness wounds the barley,
etching it with denser clouds. A herd sends its
envoy out to nose the garbage at
road’s edge before creeping into the expanse.
And the rest follow with cheap hunger—
ten at once through the swaying curtain, heads
tipped, disappearing in the dim.
Wrong to think of them as vessels
in which your feelings live, leaping across emptiness.
Light a candle. Entertain pity all evening.
It isn’t the deer’s work to hold you. That isn’t you
growing full in the field. Paint them, your
heaviest brush lavish with creams and blacks,
trembling, timid, before the canvas.
Copyright © 2016 by Paula Bohince. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 19, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I knew that ‘Deer at Twilight’ would be an acrostic, but I was surprised by the swerve towards self-recrimination mid-poem. I struggled mightily with the last three lines, until the rebuking voice turned gentler, advising ‘Paint them,’ and the brush (not the speaker) became deer-like.”
—Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince is the author of three collections from Sarabande Books. Her translations of Corrado Govoni have received the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize from The Massachusetts Review and the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review.