My Daughter Leads Me into the Woods
to a place across the street she wants to show me
to the hollow beneath the grove of squeaky willow
to a crick in the creek she’s cleared of snow
to the spot she was standing when she first saw
the deer melt on the hillside, three
bright green portals to sunnier days
where a mama I try to explain
and two fawns must have spent the snowy night
but before I can finish she grabs my hand
and squeezes and for most of my life
I’ve wanted language always
to accompany me but for right now I’m good
Trying to Teach My Kids to See Them Coming When I Can’t See Them Myself
Take this respected professor
and chair of history at the College
of St. Watchamacallit. You know
the type—still waiting for word
from Harvard on the day
he retires. He stepped to the urinal
next to me once and announced
to the wall we were staring at,
that as for him he’d decided—
years ago—to live the life
of the mind. We thought
he was harmless, his doorway
lean, his endless talking
shit like, yes, but were the Germans
culpable, as though we weren’t
wading through our fat, white
1990s American lives high
on culpability.
Now I’m at this
party years later, sneaking
a smoke on the deck, when
I recognize him and his wife
leaving a house across the street.
He gets in his car first, closest
to the door, then she in hers,
an older model parked behind.
His car starts immediately. Hers
turns a few times, but before
the engine fires, he honks,
and I hear a clunk, which I think
comes from her car dropping
into reverse, but I see he’s
pushed his bumper into hers.
He pulls forward a few feet
and backs into her car again,
which is presumably also
his car, just keeps crashing into it,
as she tries to get the engine going,
as it turns and turns but doesn’t catch.
He smashes her car so hard it slides
sideways over the sidewalk and curb:
wheels screeching, cracked plastic
bumper, hood buckled, streak of black
mud through the manicured grass.
So she sits, 10 & 2, staring at him,
as he gets out and turns and looks
at me, and rises slowly above
both cars, lifted by the billowing
smoke beneath his waving black cape,
so the whole block can clearly see
(Look! I knew it!): a Sith Lord,
a super rapist, or just some royal
piece of fucking shit! Except
he doesn’t. He’s not. He stays
in his seat, adjusts his rearview
mirror, lifts a tiny, bright flame
to his cigarette, quietly rolls
down the window, waves
to her, and in his mysteriously
unmarked car drives
slowly down the street.
Ryan Vine is the author of To Keep Him Hidden (Salmon Poetry, 2018; 2nd ed. 2019), winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, and the chapbooks WARD (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Distant Engines (Backwaters Press, 2006), winner of a Weldon Kees Award. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. His honors include the Greensboro Review’s Robert Watson Poetry Prize, an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Ryan is professor of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota.
Header photo by Jeff Feverston, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Ryan Vine by Shawna Vine.
