Sample Poems by Sarah Kennedy
Deer
Halfway across the empty interstate, I stopped
to wipe the buck’s smell from my palms. Dead
for sure, and the cop behind me was eager
to know if we wanted the meat—we’d bagged it,
after all. He’d take the antlers, if I didn’t mind,
for his grandson, and I waved him on by,
no problem, still seeing the sleek flank flash
as the deer cleared the guardrail, the white
belly, turned up by then in the median grass.
Radiator-steam hissed from the ruined hood,
and I was bleached in the headlights of the trooper’s
patrol car, idling on the shoulder. The husband
I no longer loved was in the back seat, no charges
would be filed, he was just filling in the details
for their report. I could almost hear him explaining
how free of traffic the road was, that we couldn’t
have seen it coming, that once the animal
chose to leap, there was no avoiding the wreck.
Story of My Life (An Idyll)
Pale peonies, sticky in spring, along
my childhood’s margins, a backyard grapevine
with surface errors of disease or blight.
Then erasure—snow, fungus, or yanked-up
roots. I spend years sinking my hands in dirt,
but there’s a man, my kids, lined up like an
interrogative—won’t I ever do
my job and feed them? Fix myself up some?
Break to marriage two: still I’m on my knees,
ripping grass from the hosta-bed while
a high-toned old professor tells me jokes
about Milton’s God (did the deity
make a phallus for himself? Yes, of course,
but it’s so big He can’t pick it up),
lectures me about low-voiced women,
their lovely, painted mouths. Don’t forget shrinks
with their choking ferns, their pencils marking
period, period, period. Did
I say this was my life? Another summer
of editing leaves, another lipstick
to make my delicate mouth rosy? Call
them the wilderness years: every garden
wore a human face, but nature was not
my mother. A plague on both my houses!
Here is what I meant: once I saw a bear
bloom against a guardrail on I-64,
and when I passed she crossed the lanes—an ink-
dark cursive in my rearview—and vanished
into laurel. Once, a field of sunflowers
south of Thorntown, Indiana—perfect
suns, each alone, rising in fall—sang me
all the way from the gold on my hand to
now, my blue asters holding dominion
just where the tulips dropped their trembling cups
of scarlet. I designed it that way—they’re
hardy as hell, even in furious
winds, and I poison the snails that eat at
my bleeding heart. Give me scissors or shears,
the single-click delete: how I blossomed
under the friendly knife of the family-
planning surgeon! Look at the iris, whose
rhizomes I split last August, already
insisting on first-person singular,
their blades dianthus-punctuated. Look:
my tiger lilies, aflame again since
that sharp division from their daughters, are
filled with daily grace, faithfully rhyming
the green arch of my early narcissus.
Family Resemblance
My mother lying back for the doctor,
the whole town whispering whore
before the rumor got to my father: it may be
true. The next girl—blood-tested
to prove she was his, though her eyes
should have been familiar and her jaw
had the paternal curve—was the one
he took on his weekend drives. By then,
Mom was always at home with another
big dish of ice cream, her long legs swelling
to fat, belly full of me, but my sister remembers
1960 as a long wait in the Rambler’s sticky
vinyl backseat, the old man slipping into
a strange house while she sat or napped, a lady
with a yellow beehive following him back
to the car—hours later, it seemed—
to peer in the window and wave. It may
all have happened, and if it hadn’t, would I
now be a woman from the Ozarks, maybe
childless, never married, maybe happy
just working the local paper with my parents?
My mother won’t say much, still keeping
her secrets, still telling only the one story
from her southern days—great-grandmother
Hannah hiding jars of molasses cookies
just for her during those Dustbowl years
that my grandmother veered from lover
to shrink to a Pentecostal God. I can’t imagine
what a mental hospital in Missouri
looked like in the thirties, what electro-shock
back then could do to a woman’s brain,
to a family’s good name, but I want to believe
that my mother blazed, for a while, with lust,
that she took pleasure in feeling his hands
between her thighs before she settled
for my father, church, and half a dozen
children. How far it could go to explain
my young self. Home from a romp
with some guy at work, I’d scrub myself rosy
and lie in my first marriage bed, guiltless
as a virgin, telling myself I had to stay
for the kids. But it’s not true: she sniffs
he was no better than your father, and Dad is
making up stories, too, for his new wife.
My favorite’s the one where he flies fighter planes
in Vietnam—my sisters know he was
right here in America in 1968,
smacking us around, but they mean to stay
in the will, so they nod as he counts off his kills
and the evils born with every female. The one
he labels slut, I’m long since gone, only
daughter who bears his name in adulthood.
But let it stand (my face, under makeup, is his)
that none of us, really, was any sure kin to him.