Hila Ratzabi

Poetry

Hila Ratzabi is the author of the poetry collection There Are Still Woods (June Road Press, 2022), which won a gold Nautilus Book Award and was a finalist for a National Indie Excellence Award. Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals, including Narrative, Linebreak, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, and others, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College (2007) and lives outside Chicago.

 

Capture

I want to capture the deer. Photograph fur against fog, fleck of white tail, Lake Michigan in the background. There is no blue where I want blue, only ache- tinged gray, dull knife of horizon laid flat on its side, a kind of surrender. I want the shot: mammal, water, winter, one. To get close, invisible as air, to trace those two silhouettes with my one chill finger. Their bodies darken behind stiff stalks of goldenrod, roots frozen under hoof. I mark wide circles of this bone- cold want, unnamable gray. Held in aperture of distance, creature among creatures, exposed, calibrating. I want to hold them. Against lake and sky. To nestle here, at the root, in the icy soil until winter unwinds and releases us. From across the field we blink, skin tingles, darkness holds us in its frame of mist.

“ I wrote this poem on my lunch break at work, which happens to be on the shore of Lake Michigan. I saw two deer across the field by the lake and tried to take a photo of them, but every time I tried to come closer or get a better angle, they watched me, on alert. It was impossible to get a good photo without scaring them away, so I just watched them as they watched me, and this poem arose out of that encounter. I was curious about that longing to capture, to hold in place, the elements of the scene, that impossible task of the artist to pin down fleeting beauty. I am also very interested in the human-animal relationship, the way that the human gaze wants to objectify the animal as a beautiful thing to capture, yet it stems from a deep sense of longing for creaturely kinship. ”

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