Fawn
This morning, still gray with early dawn, having stepped out for today’s headlines, I found a fawn in our front yard, not poised for quick exit, rather folded to a roundness as if asleep in the safe density of high grass, still dreaming the return of its mother. Partly eaten, something had brought it down where it lay or possibly dragged its dark mound from the woods across the road. Given the few choices of Indiana’s carnivores, it could’ve been a bobcat or coyote, maybe a dog, but I think not. The cunning, the raw mix of blood and fur, bones still gleaming freshly stripped, apropos of natural instinct…and yet, done with a kind of crude propriety, some semblance of order and arrangement as it rose, sated, and assumed the slowness of the bobcat that appeared years ago from the woods out back as I sat on the deck, thinking at first a domestic stray with facial ruff, the tuft of pointed ears, no hurry, a beast in charge of the moment as it took the narrow path between the neighbors’ fence and our garage, totally indifferent to my presence. As it disappeared I leapt from my chair for a quick run around the house only to see that thick shortness of a tail vanish into the woods. Today, instead of calling some county office—and for the privacy of it—my wife and I will scoop the carcass into the wheelbarrow with our gloved hands and give it the burial it deserves among the familiar songs and footfall of the wooded backyard, trusting the doe’s umbilical spirit will sort it out.
Roger Pfingston has new poems in recent issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, and I-70 Review. He is a retired teacher of English and photography.