If I Had It to Do Over, I’d Have Let the Coyotes Have All of You

I’m looking for something for dinner when I find your heart
in the freezer which reminds me of the morning I saw you

out the kitchen window. You were lying in the hayfield,
on the path you and your kin always take from the woods

to the pond and back. With the highway
in between. You were a beautiful corpse, still warm,

a trickle of blood beginning to crust under your one nostril.
If left you where you were, the coyotes would pull you apart,

all for squeamish me to watch from the window. I called
Christine. She took you home, hung you by your back legs

from a rafter in her garage so she could make you
into steaks and roasts. She called to ask if I’d like some part of you.

By the way, she added, your deer was pregnant.
(I never thought of you as my deer).

When she suggested your heart, I said yes. Yes, because
I loved you and all your parts and suddenly,

your unborn fawn. I thought of eating your heart—I did.
Christine says eating the animal you kill is how you honour its life.

Last fall when you were grazing in the hayfield, you lifted
your head and stared at me for the longest time. The clouds

over our heads were swimming in your eyes. If stillness
could be eaten, we dined together.