Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 650

Driving West through Somerset County

Intro by Ted Kooser
09.03.2017

I’ve lived in the coun­try for thir­ty years and dur­ing that time my wife and I have hit four deer. All of them leapt away over the near­est fence, unharmed, leav­ing our cars with hun­dreds of dol­lars’ worth of dam­age. But, hey, the deer lived. The deer in this father-daugh­ter poem also hap­pi­ly sur­vives. It’s by Kevin Casey, who lives in Maine, and is from his book And Wak­ing …, from Bot­tom Dog Press. 

Driving West through Somerset County

The sun climbed the rigging of a mackerel sky,
with me and my daughter following west,
 
and then the sudden, thick lashed, chestnut eye
of that poor deer, flashed as we collided.
 
Busted bumper, her bounding toward the pines—
clean-limbed, light, and sapling-sound, she vanished.
 
Stopping on the shoulder, I dreaded what damage
my own poor dear and her thick-lashed, chestnut eyes
 
had suffered, struck by their shared innocence
and that awful force; but her beaming face,
 
sunflower-broad, was filled by this thrill,
with her eager as the deer that the day
 
might move along, and the sun—without
looking down—should keep to its climbing.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.