nice images, thanks for sharing

*Pansies
A deer broke through the border bushes
of my garden at dawn
and made breakfast of my pansies.
Before I scared her off banging on a pot,
she stared me down and I saw my soul
in her frightened, haunted eyes—
pleading for a pardon—
a reprieve from execution—
for understanding—to be left her dignity.

It was a reflection in forest ponds
black as onyx,
clear and still as vanquished steel,
I saw an identical twin from a parallel universe
where my life could have been,
riding away on a unicycle—
a fast-peddling clown in oversized shoes,
an obsolete circus act from a childhood memory,
faded like the sun-blanched wallpaper
of my sitting room
where you enter stealthily
through the unlocked door to the garden
and cross the floor with noiseless steps,
the clicking heartbeat of the old clock
resting on the mantel next to the granite bust
of my hero Dostoevsky
is the only sound to stir the room
where I snooze in a chair after waiting up for you.

You drop a feather kiss on my forehead
and like the heat of a house fire
I feel approaching before I see the swirls
of Cimmerian clouds curl around me,
come to consume me,
I know you are there.

Looming above me like a hummingbird
suspended from invisible threads
ready to make a succulent meal of garden nectar
you appear an apparitional vision of a dream
and I whisper, “Are you real?”
In answer, you lead me to bed,
our clothes are shed like molting skin,
our sweat stains the sheets ripped from the mattress,
our legs and arms entangle
in a helicoid pretzel,
the chemical fountains of our loins surge in concert,
a rush of botanical fluids burst from pistil glands;
you kiss my throat and sigh.

In the kitchen, I make us tea
and blot your scratches with cognac--
you hold an ice cube to my swollen, bitten lip
and say you’re sorry.
“Don’t leave me again—I will die without you!”
I want to plead like the mirrored eyes of the deer
that held me in its ephemeral stare that morning.
But you won’t hear because you’ve already gone,
vanished out the back way while I slept,
imperceptibly as the morning mist from my garden,
leaving me only your marshy seed, still inside me.