The More Extravagant Feast

The buck is thawing a halo on the frosted ground,
shot in our field predawn.

Last night we pulled a float in the Christmas parade.
It was lit by a thousand tiny lights.

My daughter rode in my lap and was thrilled
when the float followed us. Ours is a small town.

Everyone was there. And their faces,
not seeing ours, fixed behind us, were an open sea,

a compound sea of seas that parted
under our gaze. And Santa was bright,

though my daughter shied from the noise of him.
She studied the red and white fur of his suit.

She woke this morning when the rifle fired outside.
I lifted her to see the sunrise

and her father, kneeling above the buck’s body
in the middle distance. She asked if they would be cold.

I brought him gloves and warm water, knelt with him
in the spare light by the buck, who steamed, whose liver

and heart, kept so long dark,
spilled onto the winter grass,

whose open eyes saw none of it, realized
nothing of my husband’s knife

slicing open his abdomen, his rectum. The puncture
of his diaphragm startled me more than the gunshot,

opening a cavern of deep blood that poured
over his white belly. I did not

understand the offering, but loved it,
the fur red, white, incoherent. Somehow cleaner.

When I come back in, she asks me to draw a picture
of her father on the hill. I pick her up—the miracle

of her lungs that grew inside me,
kept long dark—her working heart

let out into the rounder world,
the more extravagant feast. The miracle

of her dad on the hill as we draw him
in his big coat, warm. Afterward,

how he and I hold each other
differently, feeling

the collections of muscles
and organs held

somehow together. The miracle
of bodies, formed whole like fruits,

skins unruptured and
containing the world.