American Life in Poetry poem  by Kevin Casey
Driving West through Somerset County The sun climbed the rigging of a mackerel sky,
with me and my daughter following west,

and then the sudden, thick lashed, chestnut eye
of that poor deer, flashed as we collided.

Busted bumper, her bounding toward the pines—
clean-limbed, light, and sapling-sound, she vanished.

Stopping on the shoulder, I dreaded what damage
my own poor dear and her thick-lashed, chestnut eyes

had suffered, struck by their shared innocence
and that awful force; but her beaming face,

sunflower-broad, was filled by this thrill,
with her eager as the deer that the day

might move along, and the sun—without
looking down—should keep to its climbing.