deer newme oh dear oh deer who ate the beans in the garden yesterday morning, i know you were probably hungry but i was really liking the way they were growing so quickly... and i found your hoof marks and your bite marks, and i know you did it and i know you were probably hungry ... but, as you might've noticed already, i raised the gate to keep you out. please stay out. i beg you. i'll feed you later. sincerely, the gardener 040706 ... epitome of incomprehensibility It must be a seeing-animals sort of day - first a coyote, now a deer! Well, I thiiink I spotted one in a farm field that the VIA train passed, but it was too far away for any sure sure sureness. 240603 ... raze i halfway hoped to see some on the trail in optimist_memorial_park, unlikely as i knew it was. there were only bugs that didn't care enough to bite me. the last time anything with antlers stole my breath, a family of three grazed in a different park named for the indigenous people whose homeland blankets the great lakes and northern planes, and there was a hand i haven't felt on my arm in the better part of a decade now telling my eyes where to find them. 240603 ... ovenbird I have come to visit a friend in her house on the mountain. The guest bedroom opens onto a steep slope of land, punctuated by pines, home to bears and cougars and stellar’s jays, coyotes, eagles, and dragonflies. As I prepare for sleep I move to close the blinds and find myself face to face with a doe. She has smuggled herself into the fenced off garden and is delicately munching on the tomato plants. She catches sight of me and freezes, panics, searches for an exit but finds only the glass panels set into the patio railings that afford a view but not passage for a terrified body. Her hooves strike flagstone. She sees me as a threat— dangerous, unpredictable. I have no way to tell her that I am more prey than predator, that I understand her hunger, her desire to creep into a garden kept closed to her to nibble (just for one sweet second) on the things that grow there. The world’s abundance is kept out of reach, it ripens on the vine then moulders as we salivate. I want to step outside and let the doe eat from my hand. I want to offer up the salt of my palms for her to lick. I want to stand in the garden together, alert and alive, our guilty faces flecked with tomato seeds and solidarity. 250822 what's it to you? who go blather from