Doe

Doe

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

                                                                William Stafford

                                                                Traveling Through the Dark

You’d have had to hit something pretty

hard right? to know what’s inside of it, what’s been

growing behind the blood barrier all

along, quiet as a ream of paper waiting for your

words.  I mean, we have no way of knowing until

she steps out into the road in the middle

of the unplowed snow, in the middle of March,

in the middle of a storm, that all winter

she’s been carrying three lambs and can’t you

imagine the impact she takes on to knock them

all loose, three who have been blades

of grass once and now and since last fall when

that buck stood up to her are making her

a mother.  What do we have to know

about does and lambs specifically to see

missing her is not an option and its like

that William Stafford poem but for him

he’s come upon a hit and run and for

my brother he swerves however he can

but hits her anyway and takes it like he always has: grim

and well shit this ain’t going to be good and when

he’s completely stopped and she’s completely

stopped and he gets out to see where

she’s been laid out to I know each of his

gestures by heart because it’s his instinct

now: how his lips go flat like a heart

monitor line he didn’t see but knew

was coming when our mother died, or how

taking off his hat to scratch his head his fingers

brush by the scar on his scalp from an accident

he won’t and never has talked about, how

he steps out on to the broken snow and the one

headlight now spots the whole

scene: she’s dead he’s sure of it, but inside her (I don’t

want to ask how he knows, maybe her

belly is ripped back and they’re filling

the spilling out space and it’s all happening

matter-of-fact and not a hoof not a tongue twitches

unless it’s a flicker and by then he’s looked

away, he’s never able to say I saw the last

breath right in front of me I breathed

some of it, it was sweet, and I held

my breath like I’d been the one hit with something fast

and heavy too, a pickup truck in the snow,

and because it’s the way of the struck

from out of nowhere things, before I fall down I’m still

holding that breath, and what’s alive

in me, what’s beating, has its own heart,

and it holds on some too before, (and I never

knew I had it in me) coming loose.