I write poems, I read poems, I paint, I garden. I like solitude, I like people, I like animals. They inform my passions. I’ve had three chapbooks published by Red Hydra Press as well as several broadsides. A bunch of poems in a variety of literary magazines and on-line sites have been published. I’ve had a pushcart nomination and more than my share of rejections.
NOTE: What I consider my “best” poem still haunts me. It has never been accepted, though I have submitted it to several places where I thought it might fit. I read it now and am pulled back into the woods with the dead buck, checking him on my woodland hike, detailing how much has disappeared each day. I first saw this fine animal in his bulky entirety in a cold late autumn, and just weeks later watched the last hairs drift from the dent in the ground where he’d once settled. This old buck’s presence still enriches me in my rumination on dying and death, as it once nutritionally enriched so many creatures in those cold early winter days. It all occurred, the incident and the poem, in late October into late November, right after Thanksgiving Day, therefore the reference to a feast.
Exactitude Along the River
Whatever did him in, old buck,
there is no sign of intent,
no holes in the frozen hide.
Perhaps, tricked by thin ice,
slipping down and under,
shoved through the pickerel weed,
finally resting in his proper place
alongside the forest, skull buffed
bright in the cold air, snow in the sockets,
a meager ornamental feast
laid out in late November as invitation
to those enriched by the dying.
Exactitude Along the River
Whatever did him in, old buck,
there is no sign of intent,
no holes in the frozen hide.
Perhaps, tricked by thin ice,
slipping down and under,
shoved through the pickerel weed,
finally resting in his proper place
alongside the forest, skull buffed
bright in the cold air, snow in the sockets,
a meager ornamental feast
laid out in late November as invitation
to those enriched by the dying.
© 2019 Mary Wehner
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