I Speak for You: A Doe's Patois

I Speak for You: A Doe's Patois                                                        

And I thought

Of the tongue, of how it is a wound, a pool of blood,

And how you should bind a wound.

                                                                Pale Rider

                                                                Brigit Pegeen Kelly

We’d all seen it, though like most things we didn’t

talk about it then and we don't now though we took it 

the way all farm deaths are taken, accident or planned, legal or out

of season, in a sorrow that seemed turned on a wood

lathe, leg after leg for a table or chair or at least something

functional to stand on.  The tongue of my father’s shot true

through doe, the last one of the season, the last one he would ever

shoot, well, it hung like any loose and now useless thing:

through her teeth and I, well, I'll be honest and say

it reminded me—purple and stiff thing it was—of the first

firm penis I ever saw but you have to believe me I wouldn’t

remember or even make the connection for years and years

and when I finally did I was too old to be anything but still

shamed and fearful and forced to draw my teeth across

my own tongue and the thing it once tasted and was made to, the body

of the memory in my mouth but not in my brain if that makes

any sense.  Precious doe.  You hung up there in the hole of the attic

floor on your own special gibbet and as tiny as you are your hooves

strum just above the stray bits of straw and small random

and reckless if anyone is coming in from the dark,

cat shit.  I think that was my first real understanding of something

sacrilegious, how you were made to sway with only the turning

(though who among us feels it) earth, your only motion now,

and beneath you were the Tom’s and their ball sacks rubbing

against you and I, furious, threw them scruff and scratch, out

against our just delivered dole of cord-wood, still unsplit,

and watched them shake it all off and slink back into

the dark.  you shouldn’t be here my tongue was made to wait

to say and I was saying it for the both of us.  I looked at her, lilac

in places and almost lung blue in others tongue.  She swayed.

She was a marionette ballet.  Her hooves were those little shoes

I don’t ever remember the name of, but make a girl

or boy stand on the tips of their toes.  And ribbons criss-

cross up the front and back of the leg and for as long

as it takes to wait for her to be cut down, gutted

like she was in the woods, her now cool viscera going

to cataract milk, her tongue and eye, going off alone, limp,
completely, like any lamb or doe do who are ramrodded through,
and consumed.