In this part of Pennsylvania, roads run along
streambeds, or beside the narrow tributaries
the highest ridges conceal when they turn
their faces to the north or south—creases
marked the length of their long necks, ravines
as beautiful as the shadowed space at the base
of a woman’s throat. In these little-traveled
places, the men who have been without work
for weeks and weeks take their trucks out
into the dark to find deer, to capture them
in the gaze of their highbeams, so they might
kill, come back to their homes with more
than the defeated faces they wear as they pay
for milk and bread with food stamps, their few
real dollars laid down for a pack of Camels
they’ll smoke as they gut the animal in the barn,
taking what they can, dumping the rest along
the river where winter snows bury the arcs
of the deer’s slender white ribs.
After Andrew Wyeth’s “Jacklight” (1980)

From Some Heaven by Todd Davis. Used by permission of the poet and Michigan State University Press. Copyright © 2007 by Todd Davis.