Among our thin green tangle
She glances me
Black and wet, her eyes
See me, trembling
With her in new Spring wind

Struggle to wobble up
Into all this newness
New life, new smell, new fears,
Bereft of any experience of comfort
That might calm a skittering heart

The doe steps around the
Fast current, the slow fish
Nothing is greening fast enough for her
She is still and fades away into brown as
Her ears point toward her young

Who is dappled white
And dappled with the new Sun
They are always together now and
Step precisely around fallen trees
Another impediment, another risk

We will assume it, or
We will not assume it, and so our path
I am learning, tentative and distracted
By the narrow crush of a last night’s slumped, grassy bed,
Takes me alone briefly into an desperate new world.