Birthday Landscape With Deer and Scavengers

→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 33: FALL/WINTER 2024

The deer is dead, road-crumpled, and surrounded by vultures—

an elegant coven of seven, necks bowed, dark wings shifting

like the skirts of gossiping widows. The vultures ignore

my passage, absorbed in absorbing the deer. But I too am

a swallower of flesh and stillness, daughter of a mother

with a drawerful of blank condolence cards, watchkeeper

of windows in a forest of small birds. I have swept away

feathers, mourned friends, written in ashes, kicked my heart

forward when it tried to halt. Trotted on. I believe momentum

is just stillness unfurled. And the reverse. See what a car did

to the deer? The skid marks and blood patch? I drive warily;

the road curves as roads do and my thoughts curve as thoughts do.

If I forget the deer, it's for hours of water rippling under cloud

and reflected pines. I'm old enough to be my own ancestor

now my grandmothers are gone. I paddle an immense circle

around absence (and all the deer represents) imagining

other lakes, other paths. Motherhood is not my calling,

but there are many ladders and burdens, dreams and minds

I intend to nurture. Every birth brings forth a future death—

something none of the mother-writers on the podcast admits,

though they see how easy it is for women to become domestic

ghosts. Every poem is a body, I think, and the vultures are wise

to convert meat to wingbeats. But I'm rooting for the fox kit

who has stolen a hoof and dashed across the road with it.