Roey Leonardi
poetry
Roey Leonardi is a poet and writer from South Carolina. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Bat City Review, Calyx, Epiphany, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the editor in chief of Indiana Review.
Deer Hunt
After the hunt, I search my face in the glass and find its first seam. I believe I can see
beauty’s end. How it must crest and fall like rock. I know now the ease of descent
is a myth. On the hunt, Sophie and I followed our father down the mountain, a gun
at my hip, a gun at her hip, a gun at his hip and another slung over his shoulder.
The earth broke and rolled beneath our feet and we fell and fell again and kept picking
our way down the mountain till our father fell and did not rise and said, My hand
is hurt badly, and showed us, when we reached him, how rock had split the seam where
thumb joins palm. Wide gash. Red and ugly yellow. We tied a shirt around it and kept
moving. We hunted till the light left and his hand went blue. We glassed the hills
for Coues deer which are small and gray with large luminous ears and eyes like
individual pearls of blackberry. We saw only doe, and so shot nothing. Still we agreed
it was nice to sit and watch them in their twos and threes, their mothwing ears,
the elegant crane of their necks while eating yellow cactus fruit. They moved easily on
hoofworn paths along the very ridgeline where we’d stumbled, and they were beautiful.
We agreed. Almost silver in the sun.
“ This poem is about the marks we give and receive just by living. A wrinkle, a cut, a path worn into the earth by hooves. There is beauty in being marked, and violence, too. And then there is the other kind of beauty, the kind the does possess, however briefly. Theirs is the beauty of things left untouched.”