Kevin Casey

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.