Antelope & I
by Shelley Armitage
I’m Shelley Armitage from Vega, Texas, sharing Radio Readers Book Bytes with you today. My new poetry book, A Habit of Landscape, celebrates the overlapping meanings of habit and habitat. Each share the root words “to dwell.” These poems hold sensate moments and explore the transformative experience of the kinship between human and natural worlds. Not something “out there,” this shared space often surprises as the poem turns. Whether an elegy for a lost brother, an encounter with a pronghorn, or the whispers surrounding adoption, these lyric poems speak to the sacrality of each moment.
So may I read for you “Antelope and I.”
Antelope and I You see me—of course—before I see you. | ||
| Even at seventy-five yards your bold white chest, radiant exception to the plains gone dun, cures my nearsightedness. | ||
| You, on the other hand, can spot movement at three miles away. | ||
| Pronghorn, kwahada, Antilocapra americana, neither antelope nor deer, | ||
| (your closest living cousin, the giraffe) | ||
ancestry assures you persist with Side set eyes catch worlds in their orbs, Now this is fossil fuel: at speeds of fifty miles an hour | ||
| But I am exotic am I not? My old checkered farm coat, sagging sleeves baggy warm-ups, a whiff of acrid humanness the unwashed best tolerated upwind. I am held at a distance by your gaze. | ||
We used to talk to animals— But if you were the carnivore | ||
| line to the heart prayer over horns | ||
| Instead, I can only say in a stillness beyond thought: | ||
| I would be the grass before you. | ||
I’m Shelley Armitage for Radio Readers Book Bytes wishing you a beautiful day. Please follow me at https://shelleyarmitage.com/ where my new book, A Habit of Landscape, is featured.
