Maxine Kumin - The Word lyrics

We ride up softly to the hidden oval in the woods, a plateau rimmed with wavy strands of gray birch and white pine, my horse thinking his thoughts, happy in the October dapple, and I thinking mine-and-his, which is my prerogative, both of us just in time to see a big doe loft up over the four-foot fence, her white scut catching the sun and then releasing it, soundlessly clapping our reveries shut. The pine grove shivers as she pa**es. The red squirrels thrill, announcing her departure. Come back! I want to call to her, we who mean you no harm. Come back and show us who stand pinned in stopped time to the track how you can go from a standing start up and over. We on our side, pulses racing are synchronized with your racing heart. I want to tell her, Watch me mornings when I fill the cylinders with sunflower seeds, see how the chickadees and lesser redbreasted nuthatches crowd onto my arm, permitting me briefly to stand in for a tree, and how the vixen in the bottom meadow I ride across allows me under cover of horse scent to observe the education of her kits, how they dive for the burrow on command, how they re-emerge at another word she uses, a word I am searching for. Its sound is o-shaped and unencumbered, the see-through color of river, airy as the topmost evergreen fingers and soft as pine duff underfoot where the doe lies down out of sight; take me in, tell me the word.