pelvis buried in our terraced garden.
It was aged, smooth, smaller
than I thought it should have been.
For a few months, I balanced it
inside on our mantle, then took it back
outside and reburied it.
And I found a severed deer’s leg,
still hooved and pelted, in a bank of plowed snow.
Whether by hunter or car, I realized
death remains repugnant
until relics seem ancient, the living creature
imaginary.
Then my daughter, excavating
a rotted stump, discovered a woodchuck’s ribs,
vertebra, femur, skull.
She assembled the skeleton
on a wooden green table. I saw
the animal’s form laid out before me
like a catechism. I saw her careful fingers
slide radius beside ulna,
center the sternum, balance the lowest vertebrae
within the pelvis, the creature’s wholeness,
our memory of her young
parading through clover,
all of it restored.
