TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about poetry is that you can love a poem, even fanatically, without fully understanding it. Some of the poems I treasure the most and hold closest are poems I can’t “explain” to someone else. I can’t say what they “mean.” I can’t even articulate clearly what they’re “about.” But the fact they remain a mystery to me doesn’t diminish my experience of reading them.

Poems are like songs in this way. We can attach to them deeply without fully understanding them. Some of my favorite songs are unclear to me. I don’t know what the lyrics are referring to. I don’t understand the emotional situation behind the music. Sometimes I literally can’t understand what the singer is even saying, as in the case of songs by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. I have no idea what’s being expressed in language, but I feel the songs so clearly. They have their own vocabulary — in melody and harmony, in key and pitch. I can’t explain it, but I get it somehow.

Maybe the mystery is part of what keeps the romance alive. That happens with people sometimes, too, doesn’t it? We love them or are drawn to them for reasons we can’t always explain.

Poetry, like love, is full of mystery.

Sometimes I read or listen to a poem, and I’m absolutely charmed — seduced — by the sentences: the way they move across the lines, like a river moving around a bend, breaking around stones. Sometimes I marvel at the word choices, at the sounds, at the way a narrative unfolds.

If you asked me to explain today’s poem to you — to tell you what it means, or what it’s about — I’d fail. But the poem succeeds! It succeeds at being exactly itself, and at moving me.

Hares
by Angela Ball

Not mine but I’ll take some—
not too much, 
just part. Not the best part—
It could be best, though,
no way 
of knowing, I’ll take 
just the blue part,
the part that includes
a cantilever bridge,
or maybe the brown part, that includes
a horse’s halter, I’ll take the part 
that is cream and gray, like the mushroom
in my path, maybe the roughed-up
part, teeth marks on it,
dragged from a dank cellar,
the part that has deliquesced,
the part just painted
to resemble a mouse, the part vaccinated 
by flood, the part
that has rubbed 
against roses. The part with dropsy. The part
that flusters some; that flusters no one.
The part that brandishes endorphins,
the part that returned to life, sorely
inconveniencing the staff, the part that knows
whereof it speaks, the part that waits longest
with no coffee, no chips, no cigarettes, the part
that locks my gaze, asks my pity,
rests close against me, 
watches with me as two hares begin boxing
in the solemnity of dawn.

"Hares" by Angela Ball from STEEPLECHASE © 2026 Angela Ball. Used with the permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.