Dead Doe
by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The doe lay dead on her back in a field of asters: no. The doe lay dead on her back beside the school bus stop: yes. Where we waited. Her belly white as a cut pear. Where we waited: no: off from where we waited: yes at a distance: making a distance we kept, as we kept her dead run in sight, that we might see if she chose to go skyward; that we might run, too, turn tail if she came near and troubled our fear with presence: with ghostly blossoming: with the fountain’s unstoppable blossoming and the black stain the algae makes when the water stays near. We can take the gilt-edged strolling of the clouds: yes. But the risen from the dead: no! The haloey trouble-shooting of the goldfinches in the bush: yes: but in season: kept within bounds, not in the pirated rows of corn, not above winter’s pittance of river. The doe lay dead: she lent her deadness to the morning, that the morning might have weight, that our waiting might matter: be upheld by significance: by light on the rhododendron, by the ribbons the sucked mint loosed on the air, by the treasonous gold-leaved passage of season, and you from me/child/from me/ from … not mother: no: but the weather that would hold you: yes: hothouse you to fattest blooms: keep you in mild unceasing rain, and the fixed stations of heat: like a pedaled note: or the held breath sucked in, and stay: yes: stay but: no: not done: can’t be: the doe lay dead: she could do nothing: the dead can mother nothing … nothing but our sight: they mother that, whether they will or no: they mother our looking, the gap the tongue prods when the tooth is missing, when fancy seeks the space. The doe lay dead: yes: and at a distance, with her legs up and frozen, she tricked our vision: at a distance she was for a moment no deer at all but two swans: we saw two swans and they were fighting or they were coupling or they were stabbing the ground for some prize worth nothing, but fought over, so worth that, worth the fought-over glossiness: the morning’s fragile-tubed glory. And this is the soul: like it or not. Yes: the soul comes down: yes: comes into the deer: yes: who dies: yes: and in her death twins herself into swans: fools us with mist and accident into believing her newfound finery and we are not afraid though we should be and we are not afraid as we watch her soul fly on: paired as the soul always is: with itself: with others. Two swans…. Child. We are done for in the most remarkable ways.
Do not say we do nothing.
