(for Annie, 1921 - 2015)
“They slip through my doorway in darkness," she says,
"and they hide in my closet until I am dead
to the world, when they enter my dreams
wearing my clothes and the clothes of him
who is gone. I know they are coming.”
She waits by the back door in dawn-light with fruit
in a bowl and her fingers screwed into apple
skin and flesh puckered as her own,
agents of forces now weak as her sight.
“They visit as night ends and will come again.”
An apple she rolls out the doorway to bushes
in shadows of tree-trunks convulsing and bare
in the squall whipping, stripping each branch.
Another apple she rolls and another.
She’s emptied her bowl, but the deer have not come.
Then one doe en pointe with nose in the air,
smooth and slim like a girl on parade
but careful, the time being what it is
and her senses flustered, all blown numb
in the chaos of wind. She tiptoes.
Another young doe, another, another
dance into the light, mouthing the apples
with velvet lips, shedding tidbits
apple to apple until there are none.
The does have come, and the does have gone.
“They return when the buck comes along,
randy old boy courting his gals
with handsome neck and a rack of points
too many to count or remember," she says.
"He'll come by light of the winter moon.”
And he does, the stag, scarred and proud
as ancient oaks still dropping seed
though branches crumble and fall to the ground
like naked bones of those who are gone.
Around him in shadows, does of the dawn.
Asleep then, she sees them. They come to her bed,
soft noses uplift her, princess and queen,
in the fullness of time by the light of the moon.
They carry her naked now among them,
the stag and his ladies, does of the dawn.
