Yesterday I felt statues of deer tremble
from boughs of cherry trees, snow-feathered,
leg-trapped in sticky paths of goldenrod,
creek-oiled flowers of ice. And a white sun
swimming in shines of icy prey. Nothing is
what it is with me. Falling snow’s a gown,
the morning a luminescent fox.
I sway, gut-shot, in blizzard growls. I call to it, cull, cull,
a gizzard, ripe with heart of make-believed blood.
I cannot choose, I choose what comes to me. But choose.
Let each lie ask the beautiful questions of the hunter,
what man did I kill, what beast am I?
Tag: hunting
The Hunters
You were the animal that
trapped them with your eyes.
They killed you for them
but thought you’d try
to live through that.
They skinned alive the desert
for the inland sea.
When they saw you
from the blind,
they stroked your coat to say,
you were not theirs.
Animal,
how could you understand?
You were a story
they did not tell
about themselves.
You were the tracks
that lost your way to them
that they followed as
they went into the trees
that took them to the river
that you could not cross.
Beauty Lake Rd.
All afternoon
and near night
this deer
inside me
scenting for
its place
to die and lay
together,
this
deer, this
me,
we search
the sky
for it, or
the light
of each place,
to enter earth
’til finally
we see,
stepping
into
our tracks
to take us
there, the bird
that turns
air into
rivershape.
Isle of Hoy 