- Annually the doe brings her fawns
- to the feasting table that is our garden.
- We begin as City Folk, charmed at the sightings,
- become Locals in exasperation that "tall rodents"
- have once again decimated our roses and our parsley.
- This year she stepped out of the forest
- with the smallest offspring ever,
- one that fit under her when she stood.
- They were an eight-legged being,
- the inner one never straying
- from her shelter and sustenance.
- She shows him how to add sweat pea vines to his diet.
- We groan but do not shoo them.
- We cannot threaten anything so fragile and spotted.
- .
- Early morning and he is on the lawn, alone, not moving,
- watching us watch him, over the rims of our coffee mugs.
- Remembering the admonitions in the paper, we assume
- the doe is steps away and keep our distance.
- He watches us leave for work.
- .
- On the weekend, as we weed, we find his toy-like body
- in the ferns that edge the grass, still the smallest
- of all the fawns she brought here in the years before
- the driver or the hunter ended
- her eminently sensible meal planning.
- .
- Sweet peas tendril up their twine lines
- and bloom extravagantly.
- The cut stems fill our rooms with uneasy beauty.
