Everywhere we walk, orange signs warn
Private Property or Posted. Still dented cans
rattle in ditches and campfire rings,
claiming “No, mine too.” And something
in the surveyor’s talk about tramping over ridges
and steeping himself in briers to sight the division
between neighbors, that thinnest of lines,
a spidery net he casts across the county—that,
he claims, is his. All the while, at the far reaches
of our property, the burr oak swells its bark
over pig wire and a sign more rusted than orange
reads: NO SING.
And that fawn curled in the wood,
throat laid down beside side-turned hooves,
never flinched when our dog sniffed her.
She held her ground, or it held her.
Her dappled fur marked as belonging
to sunlight and fallen leaf.
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