Glen Chiacchieri's "Stranger" is a getaway told in fourteen quick lines. A driver ties something up, throws it into a pickup and speeds off. By the end we have learned, almost by accident, that he has shot someone, and that the guilt he cannot admit directly has turned the night itself into an accuser. The poem is about conscience, but the speaker never uses that word. He sounds so offhand that his unease shows through the cracks in his own story.
The opening stanza is built from physical detail: a "grooved bed" and a "maroon Ford pickup." It reads like the start of a crime film, and the pronoun "it" keeps us off balance. We never learn what was tied up and heaved. The poem doesn't say, so any answer is an inference. We might guess a body, a bundle or a person, but the speaker treats it as an object, and that coldness is part of the effect. Three of the first four lines end on or near the word "and," so the sentence tumbles forward without pausing to reflect. The syntax acts out the escape: no stopping, no looking back.
Then the poem turns. "The night roared back / or so I thought." That hedge, "or so I thought," is the first sign of an unreliable mind. The truck has roared, and now the darkness answers in the same word, as if the driver's own noise were being thrown back at him. The night's response is "oblique animal rage," and each word does something. "Oblique" means slanting and indirect, so the rage never confronts him head-on. "Animal" makes it instinctive and wordless. Even so, the rage is "twisting moonlight / into words," which is a strange, almost synesthetic chain. Light becomes language, and language becomes "near-miss / car collisions." The speaker is hearing accusations in the glare and feeling them as swerves on the road. The sound of the lines helps, since "maroon" and "moonlight" echo each other, as though the truck and the sky have been linked. The phrase "near-miss" also stings, because the night only nearly hits him, while his own bullet, we learn, did not miss.
That reveal arrives in the final stanza, and its tone is the cleverest thing in the poem. "I think it is mad at me," he says, in the voice of someone who has annoyed a neighbor. Violence is shrunk to an oversight: he is in trouble "because I forgot to / remove my bullet / from that stranger's shoulder." The verb "forgot" turns a shooting into a chore left undone, like leaving keys behind. The line break after "to" makes the reader wait a half-beat for the absurd word "remove." The possessive "my bullet" is telling too, since he owns the weapon's act even while he plays it down. The wound is only in the shoulder, which perhaps explains why the tone stays so flippant, though the poem never says so.
The tenses add to this. The first stanza is in the past, a story he can narrate. The last moves into the present: "I think it is mad at me." The deed is over, but the consequence has not stopped. Distance offers no safety either. It is measured in "so many miles," not hours or days, which suggests a man who has gone far geographically and gotten nowhere morally. The word "it" returns here too, now meaning the night, so the poem's first mystery and its last seem to rhyme. The speaker has been running from "it" all along, and he cannot tell the thing he left behind from the thing chasing him.
The title also repays attention. The only person named is a stranger, someone the speaker has no relationship with, and yet it is this stranger who haunts the poem. Judging by the text, the speaker's deadpan manner is a way of keeping the person at a distance. The night, however, seems to refuse that distance.
The poem is significant because of what it leaves out. There is no confession, no scene of the shooting and no explanation, only a speaker who displaces his guilt onto the landscape. In a few plain lines, it shows how a conscience can speak even when its owner refuses to listen.