Susan Roberts
Cervidae
A deer can cause a storm in an apple tree. Watch
the old limbs tremble at the lips’ dark gloss.
A deer doesn’t travel far from where it was foaled,
making it easy to track: fawn to doe to buck
to shimmering tail lashed to a pickup’s hood.
A deer is a kind of death: half-life of badger
or otter if winter brings too much snow.
It has its own rhythm of exchange: a quivering
insistence that violence lives just beyond
the peripheral.
How do you handle them feeding on your turnips
and carrots, the lettuce you’d planned on for supper?
A deer will not yield to metal and glass: it believes
its leap will transect space and it often does on lonely
back roads. It does poorly on highways.
Once, in a pasture, I lay on my back watching a fading
day when a thunder crossed over me: bellies of speckled
brown, two of them side by side, soar across the sky
and into a stand of firs. Gone.
Susan Roberts’ poems have been most recently published in The MacGuffin, The Bangalore Review, Dovecote Magazine, ellipsis, The RavensPerch, The Tishman Review (RIP), Salamander, The Brooklyn Quarterly and Sharkpack Annual. She teaches literature and writing at Boston College, and divides her time between the gothic homestead in central Vermont where she was raised and the busy weirdness of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.