MARSH BUCK

If I were a deer

I’d want to be an old marsh buck

What a pillowy place to bed

Softened and spongy

From the river gone wide

Passing through the mud

one silent drop at a time

Like a flash flood

In slow motion

It roars just underfoot

So quiet that everything is muted

The black of the raven is gray

They seem to even holler half loud.

It’s like the place makes its own fog.

The only thing sharp is the tart of cranberries

And a couple times a year

A hunter crashing in from the cut

But he’ll bump into the button buck

Who didn’t know that the wind breaks on that finger of Fir.

The golden does I bed out here are all sweet gale and cotton grass

Like home

And the girls I tend back in the timber

Smell like Christmas all year long.

People often go up and up

To peaks with lofty views

They shy away from low, soft places

Where there’s no such thing as solid ground

Because somehow falling from the top seems better

Than just sinking in

Not me though

I don’t need to see beyond these paintbrushy pines

I know what’s out there

Just more of me

So let this moss take me in so slow I don’t notice

Let the bog carry me in it’s cool mouth for awhile

Before it swallows me down

And hold me so tight that my body forgets to rot.