398. The Fawn by Molly Peacock

Poet (and widow) Molly Peacock reads a poem called The Fawn from her new book of poems about widowhood, The Widow’s Crayon Box.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

Molly Peacock: Hi, I’m Molly Peacock and it’s going to be okay.  I’m going to read you a poem called The Fawn.  I’ve been a poet for  50 something years  and for 30 something years of that time I was married to a wonderful man  who passed away.  And now I’m a widow, but it’s going to be okay, I discovered, when I started writing poems about the process of my waking up after he passed away,  and I had a dream,  and this poem is about that dream,  and what was happening to me  as I started to wake up and started to realize that it really was going to be okay.

The Fawn.  From a waking world it’s hard to go dreamside,  but that’s how it was  where inside met outside at once.  I slept on a platform of a three walled house  that opened to the woods.  I was fast asleep inside my sleep.  Morning,  I felt only the light.  My eyes were closed  and there was something else, raspy but soft, moist against my cheek.

The lapping tongue of a fawn.  The fawn had settled beside my bedclothes.  When I opened my eyes in this dream of waking,  I could only have had one asleep.  It was dawn.  The fawn’s nose was black and wet. Its tongue was forest pink.  It filled me with a speckled softness.  You’d been dead nine months,  but my new life licked at me.

I was just as old as I am now in the dream,  but  I had a child thought as I stared into the liquid eyes of the deer.  It’s talking  just to me,  not in words  but  in understanding.  Neither the deer nor I were yet  standing.

So  I took the word understanding literally. I was kind of under. my understanding, but it was the beginning of my standing up.  I  have to admit that I cried for 28 days after he died,  but on the 29th day,  I suddenly didn’t cry anymore.  I had woken up  and this poem about the faun  recapitulates the internal workings of that situation.

And I feel so lucky to be a poet because  I got to process that loss with a wonderful image that I can hold to and re read and offer to you because it’s going to be okay.