The buck[s] stop[s] here

Midday, midweek, cool, rainy, kind of gloomy. I was at a meeting in Minneapolis all morning and had another appointment this afternoon. I wasn't sure when or how I'd get a chance to write something for My Minnesota. I needed something to cheer me up. I got it them. As I looked out the picture window, I saw a young fork horn buck, still in velvet, poking along the edge of the woods. I got my camera, took some pictures and felt considerably cheerier than I had fifteen minutes before. Then I looked again, wondering how he had moved to the front of the apple trees without my noticing. Then I saw that this wasn't the first buck, this was another one with slightly smaller antlers, also in velvet. That's more bucks at one time than I've seen in my entire life before this. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

fork horn #1 in velvet

Photo by J. Harrington

fork horn #2 in velvet

Photo by J. Harrington

Waumandee

By Mark Wunderlich 

A man with binoculars   

fixed a shape in the field   

and we stopped and saw   

the albino buck browsing   

in the oats—white dash   

on a page of green,   

flick of a blade   

cutting paint to canvas.   

It dipped its head   

and green effaced the white,   

bled onto the absence that   

the buck was—animal erasure.   

Head up again, its sugar legs   

pricked the turf, pink   

antler prongs brushed at flies.   

Here in a field was the imagined world   

made visible—a mythical beast   

filling its rumen with clover   

until all at once it startled,   

flagged its bright tail—   

auf Wiedersehen, surrender—   

and leapt away—   

a white tooth   

in the closing mouth of the woods.

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