Chickamauga

Chickamauga

—  per one translation, Cherokee for "dwelling-place by the big water"

Gracie found the fawn dewed-over 

in the field, who just months ago we watched

from the window bend his wet nose

to June’s first, small windfall beneath

the Gala tree. His mother spooked

and ran when we crept closer to see. Last week

they pulled a toddler from the creek downtown, 

facedown, and I got out of it a line,  a rhyme,

cause once against it wasn’t mine, 

a spotted neck and haunch the only handhold 

on offer to help heft the world’s weight.

No answers here, just the chronic ache 

of bending to the burden, shoveling him under 

the oak beside the frozen rabbits, the pane-punned

Chickadees. After the burial we biked the battle-

field, rubber tread crunching brittle dead

of November, tires upheld by turf     

upheld by indigenous decay of what is native,  

navy, and gray. It was a death-defying day, 

while as the news makes clear far more

than deer explode like old apples

stung on the cold, hungry barrel 

of a baseball bat somewhere overseas. 

It’s not that I don’t believe, just who can say 

they know what to make of that, since 

this evening, in that very same world,

woodsmoke smells like what we hoped

to say and daughters pray for their hair done

in pink rubber-bands. Is there a thread? 

We look for words till suddenly we’re said,

too tangled in it to pick out the strands.

Sometimes, when the smoke in here 

sits extra thick, some of us slip out 

to stare across this dark glimmering 

on whose banks we dwindle and dwell, 

the moonbridge babbled but not yet lost in translation.