Through the coldest moments, when it feels as if the earth Will never again grow warm, lover running toward lover, The branches tearing back, the mouth and eyes wide,
The heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her. – Brigit Pegeen Kelly, ‘All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer’
I found her stood over the wreckage of the last atomic family on earth. A damp breeze wheezing through the brake. Her skin tinged apricot, as all things are when the day turns drowsy. We were girls then. Hooves beating hardened ground. She was ominously new to the planet. Had never lived outside eternity. Each bambi lesbian was the first of her species. She stood looking over that damaged home and marked hours against a biological clock. She thought it peculiar. These people she said, are always waiting for their lives to begin. Seized through the coldest moments, when it feels as if the earth
weeps wet with dew. In the dark should the stars too turn to quiet? I said nothing. In the old world we were always asked where we stood. The world a composition of every imagined politic. We stood in the abattoir. To the hunters we were the hunters. We got good at smelling the sweetness of life on earth. She turned away from the ruin. At her feet fern roots ceased to begin, light passing through her in three places. The woods had whispered something to her and she was frightened of it. The thought the meat of her would never again grow warm. Lover running toward lover
like halogen headlights toward doe. She had not anticipated that still time ran straight here. Darling, she said, dear are we letting the world make us this way? All present, no future. Past a forest fire looming on the horizon. The fire was a metaphor. Like the moment the sun sank into water and turned it to liquid gold. I did not have fire inside me. Inside me there was not blood but chronology. Thirteen decades of bambi history. Burning, placid truth. To live on earth was to desire. To dream always of breaking out of time, the branches tearing back, the mouth and eyes wide,
beneath twigs snapping the sound of hooves striking and striking the shambles. On this sweet sad earth we were born. Among the pines, the dense thicket of reeds. A republic of wilderness she said. Each bambi lesbian is the first of her species. On our backs grew diaphanous patterns of temporal calculus, bambi time in its becoming. Possible only in the next world. Concrete utopia a premonition of the gentlest arrangement of atoms in reach. The heart counting time to grow the things that die— the heart clasping time like prayer grasps devotion— the heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her.
