Synchronized with your racing heart

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Y o u   R e d   M e   R i g h t

Elmwood Cemetery

Charlotte, North Carolina

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We ride up softly to the hidden

oval in the woods, a plateau rimmed

with wavy stands of gray birch and white pine,

my horse thinking his thoughts, happy

in the October dapple, and I thinking

mine-and-his, which is my prerogative,

both of us just in time to see a big doe

loft up over the four-foot fence, her white scut

catching the sun and then releasing it,

soundlessly clapping our reveries shut.

The pine grove shudders as she passes.

The red squirrels thrill, announcing her departure.

Come back! I want to call her,

we mean you no harm. Come back and show us

who stand pinned in stopped time to the track

how you can go from a standing start

up and over. We on our side, pulses racing,

are synchronized with your racing heart.

I want to tell her, Watch me

mornings when I fill the cylinders

with sunflower seeds, see how the chickadees

and lesser redbreasted nuthatches crowd

onto my arm, permitting me briefly

to stand in for a tree,

and how the vixen in the bottom meadow

I ride across allows me under cover

of horse scent to observe the education

of her kits, how they dive for the burrow

on command, how they re-emerge at another

word she uses, a word I am searching for.

= Maxine Kumin =

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Happy Thursday