The Still Hours
Aza Pace | Poetry
In the garden, inexplicably
dead without a scratch,
a fawn is a kind of secret.
I crane my neck like a doe,
searching for someone
behind the trees to want him.
Maybe someone watches
to see if I want him. Odd offering,
he is knotted like a silk scarf in the ivy.
(My secret is I’m so fond
of everything
it’s embarrassing.)
I carry him, death-heavy,
in my softest pillowcase,
and bury him at the look-out,
mark the spot
with a scrap of limestone.
Soon, I will only remember.
Suffering ticks like a clock
above the forest, the field.
In a pause, like the top of an inhale,
moss spreads luminous across the stone.
In the quiet hours, any small
kindness, while no one sees.
Aza Pace’s poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Mudlark, Bayou, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and an Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of North Texas.
Featured Image by Rinnie Deer