Читать книгу Pictograph - Melissa Kwasny - Страница 12

PICTOGRAPH: THE RED DEER PLACE

Close to the river, rain-clear near its shore: seven doe, rose-orange. A mother with a fawn. One starburst. A hundred tally marks. A kind of feather. Clear water, red lacquer of the bare dogwood branches, the shale muted, mixed, spirit tempered with blood. Rock-blood, which is a flower shade, more silent, safer. Your mother is entering a timelessness on the edge of death. A light source so distant we feel auxiliary. Yet a loud thrumming of our ears against the gates. Why do whitetail deer have a white tail that could so easily betray them? Does it bind them like knots in a rope at night or in the confusion of flight from harm? The white is not so bright in the broken tines of hoarfrost, the penciled-in trunks of aspen that fall in lines like faults or fences, yet these look like deer bodies, too. It is perhaps the heathering, the empty space between the colors. A fading language that might be bridge to our existence here.