Garden Beans
They come at night and eat
my garden beans, still small,
just venturing their green selves
into new leaves. The deer
crop them off neatly, leaving
their precise prints behind,
justified, perhaps,
by the startling grace
of every step, every tight motion.
The snails are perhaps justified
by their intense strangeness,
sliming through midnight on one foot
bearing a crusty roof, eyes protruding
on stalks, reeled in sometimes,
experts on filagreeing bean leaves
to nets of veins. In either case,
whatever the justifications,
I'd rather have the beans. Myself.
