Finding the Heart
       

Under the hydrangea, a heart
the dogs have found, a deer's
left by a hunter in our woods,
the carcass gutted where it lay, and I,
having never seen anything
like it, larger than anyone's fist
I know of, fetch the shovel because
it is so newly out of the body,
I am sure it was beating
only yesterday or the day before
and so bare beside the knife's
fresh cut and so powerful, somehow,
as if it did the work of living
still that I cannot bear
this awful cleaving from
the breath it made
and I dig a small grave.

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Copyright © 2012 Kathryn Kirkpatrick All rights reserved
from Unaccountable Weather
Press 53
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission