| KATIE PHILLIPS |
| Driving Montana, Alone | |
| 2010 |
| "The
haunting poems in Driving Montana, Alone are in physical and spiritual
motion ." —Connie Wanek "Phillips offers her readers a series of gritty, pastoral, elegiac poems. Her radiantly distilled meditations are uncompromising, direct, and beautiful." —Denise Duhamel |
Raccoon
By the cemetery, I hit him.
He did not make a sound,
just wrapped his striped tail round and
dipped the tip in the blood he
was becoming.
I went back and hit him again,
to be right, to be kind.
That road was never darker.
My headlights must have seemed
like distant
moons, then blazing suns-
then music of the spheres.
The moon, so
orange, did not fit
between leaves. It slipped
away, made itself
an
anti-leaf. I thought if, heavy
with haze, it crashed down
on this paved
planet,
there would be no room
for me.