Fawn's Foster-Mother

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels

With her meagre pale demoralized daughter.

Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun

And saying that when she was first married

She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.

(It is empty now, the roof has fallen

But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods

Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;

The place is now more solitary than ever before.)

"When I was nursing my second baby

My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake

And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast

Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.

Hey how it sucked, the little nuzzler,

Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach.

I had more joy from that than from the others."

Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road

With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.

She is thrown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin

Soon to be shed from the earth's old eye-brows,

I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,

The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.