John Poch
Poem for My Father
There is a deer at the end of a long lane
that could be in the mountains or a street,
it doesn’t matter. Let us say a mountain,
on an empty path. What matters is the rack
of antlers on his head, this young, big buck
of whom I dream, my father re-incarnate,
a lord of the tall woods and ghost of days
when I trusted him with everything I was.
Powerful, he stands there waiting to bolt
but does not bolt. The lane lined by pine-straw gold
is shadowed, but the buck, his head like a lantern
is lit in the clearing by the sun, so the antlers
are covered with felt and glow. I long, behold
them one hundred yards away, a football field.
My father was the fastest. The story goes
he got his teeth knocked out in high school on
the gridiron. I love that term, grid-i-ron,
the way it feels in the teeth, the hurt you bite.
And here a deer still pauses as we pause,
my daughters and I looking down this sight
at my father though they cannot know him.
This is a dream and this is not a dream.
We marvel at the wild and shush each other.
He moves into the woods.
No, my father
is not that buck but the antlers of last year’s buck
gnawed upon by the rain, the summer sun,
lying in some woods where they came unstuck
near the base of a tree, bleached, almost hidden,
pretending they are forked lightning, lying
there unlike anything else alive or dead.
Anyone would love to find them shining,
carry them back into the world of the living,
to act the fool and put them on one’s head.
John Poch teaches in the English Department at Texas Tech University. His most recent book is Texases (WordFarm 2019).
Return to July 2021 Edition
There is a deer at the end of a long lane
that could be in the mountains or a street,
it doesn’t matter. Let us say a mountain,
on an empty path. What matters is the rack
of antlers on his head, this young, big buck
of whom I dream, my father re-incarnate,
a lord of the tall woods and ghost of days
when I trusted him with everything I was.
Powerful, he stands there waiting to bolt
but does not bolt. The lane lined by pine-straw gold
is shadowed, but the buck, his head like a lantern
is lit in the clearing by the sun, so the antlers
are covered with felt and glow. I long, behold
them one hundred yards away, a football field.
My father was the fastest. The story goes
he got his teeth knocked out in high school on
the gridiron. I love that term, grid-i-ron,
the way it feels in the teeth, the hurt you bite.
And here a deer still pauses as we pause,
my daughters and I looking down this sight
at my father though they cannot know him.
This is a dream and this is not a dream.
We marvel at the wild and shush each other.
He moves into the woods.
No, my father
is not that buck but the antlers of last year’s buck
gnawed upon by the rain, the summer sun,
lying in some woods where they came unstuck
near the base of a tree, bleached, almost hidden,
pretending they are forked lightning, lying
there unlike anything else alive or dead.
Anyone would love to find them shining,
carry them back into the world of the living,
to act the fool and put them on one’s head.
John Poch teaches in the English Department at Texas Tech University. His most recent book is Texases (WordFarm 2019).
Return to July 2021 Edition