A Hunger So Honed by Tracy K. Smith
Driving home late through town Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh– I watched a long time All phantom and shadow, so silent The mind a dark city, a disappearing, I thought of the animal’s mouth We want so much, That unconscious roving, As though we were just some offering And we drove on, our own limbs
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream–
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.
The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,
Sloppy after that, our need for one another
Greedy, weak
