Summer 2002
	Vanessa Stauffer
	Geography
	Our father counts seven dusky shadows beneath the elm, but my brother points out one more - a fawn, motionless, alert - & leashes the setter at this feet, hopes
	the dog won't shatter the precarious hush. We're overlooking the Susquehanna from the back porch of his new house, the river hills "round as loaves of manna
	dropped from Heaven," he tells me, his laugh startling the whitetails. The heard dissolves, vanishing in twilight as our father curses their quick flight & my brother thinks of
	dawn, when he'd stood like The Geographer at his window, studying his square of the earth.