Driving West through Somerset County

The sun climbed the rigging of a mackerel sky,

with me and my daughter following west,

 

and then the sudden, thick lashed, chestnut eye

of that poor deer, flashed as we collided.

 

Busted bumper, her bounding toward the pines—

clean-limbed, light, and sapling-sound, she vanished.

 

Stopping on the shoulder, I dreaded what damage

my own poor dear and her thick-lashed, chestnut eyes

 

had suffered, struck by their shared innocence

and that awful force; but her beaming face,

 

sunflower-broad, was filled by this thrill,

with her eager as the deer that the day

 

might move along, and the sun—without

looking down—should keep to its climbing.