So here is the old buck
     who all winter long
had traveled with the does
     and yearlings, with the fawns
just past their spots,
     and who had hung back,
walking where the others had walked,
     eating what they had left,
and who had struck now and then
     a pose against the wind,
against a twig-snap or the way
     the light came slinking
among the trees.

Here is the mangled ear
     and the twisted, hindering leg.
Here, already bearing him away
     among the last drifts of snow
and the nightly hard freezes,
     is a line of tiny ants,
making its way from the cave
     of the right eye, over the steep
occipital ridge, across the moonscape, shed-horn
     medallion and through the valley
of the ear's cloven shadow
     to the ground,
where among the staves
     of shed needles and the red earthy wine
they carry him
     bit by gnawn bit
into another world.

The doe, at a dead run, was dead
the instant the truck hit her.
In the headlights I saw her tongue
extend and her eyes go shocked and vacant.
Launched at a sudden right angle—say
from twenty miles per hour south to fifty
miles per hour east—she skated
many yards on the slightest toe-edge tips
of her dainty deer hooves, then fell
slowly, inside the speed of her new trajectory,
not pole-axed but stunned, away
from me and the truck's decelerating pitch.
She skidded along the right lane's
fog line true as a cue ball,
until her neck caught a signpost
that spun her across both lanes and out of sight
beyond the edge. For which, I admit, I was grateful,
the road there being dark, narrow, and shoulderless,
and home, with its lights, not far away.