The Antelope Tree
April 25, 2013It killed you to see it—not the tree but the antelope leg dangling from it, part star, part scar, cached, perhaps, by a big cat from the hills. A deer…
It killed you to see it—not the tree
but the antelope leg dangling
from it, part star, part scar,
cached, perhaps, by a big cat
from the hills. A deer not fifty yards
from it, grazing off Sheep Mountain
Road. Wood ticks must be grumbling
her flesh. The live animal,
or the dead one? You are neither
alive nor dead, you think,
the almost-full moon firing
the pines, one day from whole, one chunk
either side of complete. Something eating
its light, or feeding it.
—George Kalamaras (Allen County)
This poem previously appeared in George Kalamaras’s chapbook, The Mining Camps of the Mouth, New Michigan Press, 2012, and winner of the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest. It also appeared in the journal Hunger Mountain.
George Kalamaras has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck (2012, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize), The Mining Camps of the Mouth (2012, winner of the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (2000, winner of the Four Way Books Intro Prize). He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
Indiana Humanities is posting a poem a day from Indiana poets in celebration of National Poetry Month.
