11 Explain “hunger”.

When I say hunger, I mean wanting something in a way that holds your imagination and turns road signs into ravines between the thing you want and the thing you can survive. The limit presents itself in the possibility of failure. The possibility is the world we risk.

When I say knowledge, I mean memory teaches chairs to dance and tempo emerges in the pattern shadows cast across stones.

When I turn from the material of the poem to its justification, I forget what to fear and what to preserve, or how to distinguish between the thing one beholds and the thing one wants to own. There is something both animal and not-animal in it. Like the doe we hit on a back road in rural Georgia, the soft smudge of her surprised-open eyes, the slowness with which life left them blank: the horror of the thing one did not see coming is how one is defined by it.

I remember the tall pine forest smothered in dusk, the scent of cold pine filling my nostrils as I tried to rouse her. The doe’s fur twitched beneath my fingers. There was no cell phone network, no streetlight, no house or human on that road for miles in either direction. Only a mother and three young children trying not to cry, determined to keep the deer company as she died.

No one should die alone.

No accident is innocent of this scene wherein someone survives and someone dies and the living must reckon with the difference.

By the time the doe stopped breathing, it was pitch black outside. There was nothing left for us to do. We placed a few leaves over the doe. We left the scene of my crime in darkness, and carried the dark with us to the farm where we slept that night.