Poem of the Week

Daphne Hitchhikes Across Montana and Death Stops for Her

Barbara Hamby

He wasn’t really Death, but he could have been. His name

was Ernest, and he was driving his rig to Chicago

filled with party supplies—“You know, balloons, banners,

tableware.” He asked me about myself,

but what could I say—I’m a Greek girl who ran away

from the God of Poetry because I wanted to be free

to roam the highways of Time, though the roads

have changed—nothing like the Roman roads,

which led somewhere, as opposed to the one I’m on now,

a long way from the woods where I lived for at least

a hundred years until my tree fell away like a worn-out

dress. Ernest has a little cat who rides shotgun

on the dashboard. Her name is Penny. What does she

think about the road she’s on—the plains,

the tawdry outskirts of small cities and towns with neon

come-ons so luminous in the trembling night,

its built-in mystery like our minds when we close

our eyes, and the darkness lives in us, a teeming

city of wrecked cars going nowhere with our dreams,

driving to a party that might be in the next town over.

The Yale Review · “Daphne Hitchhikes Across Montana and Death Stops for Her” by Barbara Hamby

how did this poem begin for you?

This poem is part of a sequence of poems from the point of view of the ancient Greek nymph Daphne, who turned into a tree while running from Apollo. The sequence was inspired by an Anselm Kiefer sculpture I saw at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence during the summer of 2024. Daphne saw me coming, because she immediately started dictating poems. She told me that when her tree dissolved, she started moving through time. I’m still writing these poems, and Daphne’s voice is getting wilder and wilder. She’s talking to everyone—Jesus on the Cross, Queen Elizabeth I, Rita Hayworth, Julian of Norwich. Floria Tosca, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, and one of my favorites, a character called Mr. Twister, who rides tornadoes. The Marquis de Sade casts her as Hamlet in a production in hell. I’m having way too much fun, but I’m going to keep taking dictation as long as Daphne wants to talk to me.

Barbara Hamby is the author of eight poetry books, most recently Burn. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and other magazines. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She teaches at Florida State University.