Brenda Edgar

Snow Globe

Every day that crystalline winter,
we walked along the roaring river.
Icicles festooned the trees like
transparent daggers; frozen moss
crunched underfoot. As our son took
root in my belly, weasels slid
into the cold whitewater after small fish
who glinted silver in the glare of the sun.
Our daughter, sparrow-light, leapt
over fallen trees with her small narrow feet.
We found the place where the whitetail sleep,
their concave nests formed in the stiff rushes
by the weight of their brown bodies.
Deer sleep shallow, but not shallow enough:
one of the hollows held the skeleton
of a doe, relieved of her flesh in the dark
by cunning coyotes. The remaining deer
must have bedded down each night
near the carcass as it was slowly cleaned
by maggots, dried by wind. Our two dogs
scavenged the bones, gnashed the jaws
and hooves with sharp teeth, argued
over the skull in a charade of a successful
hunt.  When the black dog died a year later,
we released her remains into the rapids.
Generations of deer will dip their
warm muzzles into the water
and drink deeply of her bones.

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Brenda Edgar is an art history professor and emerging poet from Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has been published in the Comstock Review.