Patty Crane: “Restless”
RESTLESS
1.
We startled each other.
The doe burst up and off to the trees
while her fawn shot out
a few feet from where I stood
at the edge of the mown path
and stopped dead, a statue
made of tall whispering grass
topped with a small deer head
and long radaring ears.
A pulsing stillness leapt between us.
We changed places.
There was an abundance of time and fear.
2.
They bedded right here.
Two tamped-down ovals in the field—
one small, one big,
and a good ten feet apart.
Last night, it was hot. No wind.
We slept restlessly with the fan,
windows wide and listening
as our silent night-thoughts crossed paths.
Blanket and sheet kicked off.
A barred owl’s persistent calling
echoed up from the north.
And once, the eerie resonant huff of a deer.
All this evidence, so easy to miss,
is akin to the deepest memory,
the thinnest membrane
of distance between us.
Patty Crane is the author of the poetry collection Bell I Wake To (Zone 3 Press First Book Award, 2019), the chapbook something flown (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, 2018), and translator of The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and Bright Scythe (Sarabande Books, 2015), selected translations of the Swedish Nobel laureate. Crane’s poems have most recently appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, and Vox. Recent translations have appeared in American Poets, Poetry, Five Points, and Guernica.