Consider the buck in the scalloped glade
of my neighbor’s yard, statuary until
the breathing from his sueded ribcage.
Behold the buck, his rack two Y’s
sheathed in velvet; delicate, ill-equipped
for skirmish, for claiming his place
in the order of things.
Pity him, drawn from hospitable woods
to this world of strategic thickets.
Streetlights blot stars surfacing
over back yard pools.
Admire the moist orbits of his brown gaze,
how the tawny light slants
across muzzle and arched neck.
He might have stepped
from a Fleur de Lys tapestry
into this suburbia. The winged stag.
Regard his grandeur, how it summons
a lostness, and for a long moment
we stand at the lintel of adjoining worlds,
alert to the strangeness of each.
A quiver runs the length of my dogs’ leashes.
We inhale unruly roses and lilies, the delicious scent
of wildness in the grass.
Now follow his echoing clop, soft across the asphalt,
toward somewhere beyond the boulevard, ghosted
by twilight, the busy whiz of east/west traffic.
This poem first appeared in Imagine a Town (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2019).
—
Barbara Sabol lives in Akron, Ohio, close to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, whose trails she knows by heart. She was named Ohio co-Poet of the Year for her sixth book, Watermark: Poems of the Great Johnstown Flood of 1889 (Alternating Current Press, 2023). Her collection, Imagine a Town, was chosen for the Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize in 2019. Other honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her forthcoming book, Mapping the Borderlands: Haibun and Tanka Prose, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2025.
