Facts About Deer

@deerlie.bsky.social

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only a small amount of fiction

A baby Siberian Musk Deer in the Columbus Zoo enclosure. The deer is laying in a pile of hay with its ears up and a look of mild distrust
A torn and scraped away piece of white paper with a cartoon deer printed on it. Beneath the deer is the remains of text: BORN TO FRO ORLD IS A GARDEN Em All 1989 alive 30 JOYS. The paper is pasted to a black plywood wall
A large mural of a deer made out of woven twigs, as if from a dense bush or bird's nest on a bare concrete wall
The poem Urgency by Catherine Pierce Something is happening in the woods behind the house. Thousands of small black birds maybe grackles, you think are congregating, loud as a cathedral of swing sets. They're flying out from, then back into the turning trees. They are saying something urgent to each other. Today is the first frost, and maybe it has to do with that and maybe not, you'll never know. Every day in the woods: answered song or sudden hot mouth, satisfied hunger or the moldering stage. In yellow elm or chanterelle rot. In hollow log or sedge. Every day you make your coffee, open the blinds, gird yourself for the rigamarole of highway and committee. Every day, jacket, phone, keys, the door locked behind you. Meanwhile something is happening in the woods, maybe the most important thing that's ever happened.
As we embrace resist the future the present the past we work we struggle we begin we fail ​ to understand to find to unbraid to accept to question the grief the grief the grief the grief we shift we wield we bury​ into light as ash across our faces
What Kind of Times Are These BY ADRIENNE RICH There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.