After famished deer foraged 
The buds donning dormancy’s 
sleeping caps of snow, I mourned 

losing May’s boon of blooms 
tossing their pink and purple bouquets
to the eager bridesmaids of bees—

though each spring morning, my gaze
sought out the phantom flora 
the way amputees feel for the missing 

limb. How to sate this hunger for beauty 
if eyes can’t buffet on the banquet of blossoms
served up on its own plate of petals?

But in June, some deer from that winter feast froze
in my gravel drive to display the lost flowers 
of May’s lawn transmigrated into fawns 

blooming lovely white carnations of dots 
alongside their black-eyed Susan eyes 
until it seemed like a fair trade as I admired

 their neck’s white-lily-stripes soon transforming 
into the spider-mum-like petals of coyote pups’ ears 
nursed by the mother who’ll take the fawn down. 

And so, I planted even more rhododendrons 
to fuel beauty’s own, eternal Grateful Dead tour
in the porcupine’s Venus fly trap of a back

 sown from that dead coyote’s bones he chews 
through the winter before the fisher cat 
disembowels the brown hair flower of his belly 

to reveal the soul of rhododendron 
in her clematis-like teeth I later see blooming 
in my steel trap’s bite so that I sense the presence 

of that winter doe’s warm, ravenous tongue 
as I bud to sing of everything I see 
of beauty, everything I love.