Sunrise. A snort from the deer who sleeps under the crabapple tree. A hummingbird zips past the wild garlic.
deer
Overcast and cool. A clatter of hooves on moss as a half-grown fawn runs past, just inside the woods’ edge. The distant ringing of a phone.
A doe picks her way through the rain-soaked meadow, fawn scrambling along behind. A cerulean warbler’s ascending song.
Venus in the dawn sky. Phoebe, field sparrow, wood pewee. The alarm-snorts of a deer.
Thin fog at sunrise. Four deer in the yard ignore me only to stamp and snort at a small black cat.
Dawn. Two wrens rustle awake inside the old hornets’ nest. A doe and her nearly grown fawn graze in the yard.
Gloriously cool and sunny. A doe grazing at the other end of the yard stiffens and cocks her ears at a crow call—a sure sign she has a fawn.
A scraggly-looking doe, still in her gray winter pelt, crosses the stream below the house, pausing to graze on a multiflora rose.
Patches of bare yard dug up by deer. Patches of blue sky which the sun now and then pops through. The drip drip of meltwater from the roof.
Wandering tracks of sparrows and juncos in the snow below the porch. Beyond that, bare patches pawed open by hungry deer in the night.
Cold and gray. A deer snorts again and again over at the neighbors’—bear? Bobcat? Coyote? In the other direction, a sparrow hawk zips past.
Weak sunlight and the creek’s quiet gurgle. I think of the dead deer up in the field, her throat torn open by coyotes, feeding their songs.
An ostinato of dripping on the porch roof. The fog advances, retreats. Somewhere a deer snorts. Drenched squirrels bound over the slush.
Deer came in the night and dug up half the yard to get at the evergreen myrtle. Sun pours down from a cloudless sky. A song sparrow sings.