A buck in velvet, his coat already turning gray, startles up out of the grass. A hungry hummingbird presses her bill to the metal flamingo.
deer
Sticky and warm. A clink of ice in my coffee startles up a deer, her tan coat passing in front of a cloud of blossoming mountain laurel.
The dawn sky turns salmon. Down by the stream, the hollow cough of a deer. A swig of coffee and I’m off to count birds before the rain.
The silence of falling snow. When my furnace kicks on, the three deer digging under the wild apple tree startle and run down the slope.
A juvenile buck chases a much larger doe through the laurel, knobs for antlers and his grunts still half-bleat. The damp woods glistening.
One grown fawn attempts to nurse; the other runs into the woods, ducking its head as if pursued by some horsefly impervious to the cold.
The doe’s gray coat blends into the November woods, her two grown fawns still brown. They nuzzle through the leaf duff, feasting on acorns.
I hear it before I see it through the trees, crackling and popping in the tinder-dry sticks and leaf litter: a small herd of deer.
From the vicinity of the powerline—a stripe of sunlight through the woods—the sporadic want… want… want of a buck coming into rut.
The sound of deer running through the woods, and from over the ridge, that highway whine: we race through the deserts of our own making.
When I come outside, four deer run off: two doe, a fawn, and a buck with antlers so new he doesn’t yet duck low enough to avoid branches.
In the springhouse marsh, 13 cattail spikes are turning brown. When I go over for a closer look, a deer pops her head up, swivels her ears.
A woodchuck waddles down the road, pausing every few feet to poke its head into the weeds. A fawn bleats up in the laurel. The sun goes in.
Cloudy and cool. Up to its snout in grass, a deer sneezes. The quiet squeaks of a hummingbird circling the beebalm.