winter signs
Endpapers from The Fireside Book of Folk Songs, edited by Margaret Bradford Boni and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen, 1947. Via stopping off place.
happened into my dimension
In the dawn's early light, in the the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.
They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.
They planted their 2 or 3 years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snowscreen vision of the abnormal
And hesitated in the all-way disintigration
And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds
I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign
That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road
The deer had come for me.
Then they ducked thru the hedge, and upright they rode their legs
Away downhill over snow-lonely field
Towards tree-dark - finally
Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up
Into the boil of big flakes.
The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well.
Revising its dawn inspiration
Back to the ordinary.
Ted Hughes, 'Roe Deer'
deer
Hunting Deer with a Camera, Northern Michigan, ca. 1900. Vintage gelatin silver, printed ca. 1900.
the season
Back in Ohio, the men in my family are set up in camp and hunting deer. I'm wishing them luck.
Image via per temeritas.






