my deer

My English teacher once said
Everyone gets one dead deer poem—
This is my second.
I thought I was ready for the first,
but something went wrong when
my deer was born ugly and stayed ugly
even in death.
Where are my promised twin swans?
Sacred transformation? White tailed corpse?
Maybe it was my fault. Maybe
it was the deer’s. Maybe
I’m just jealous of the other
deer created from a sigh,
springing into the arms
of their creators,slaughtered
in a graceful, procedural ritual.
Maybe it was the way my deer
said to me, “You have no right to grieve.”
Or maybe it was shame.
I buried my deer hastily
beneath six feet of similarly ugly prose.
I wonder why I tried creating a deer in the first place
when so many could be found beneath me.
We live on a planetary graveyard:
corpses of humans who housed giants,
of empires once thought eternal,
of trees with language
rooted deep into the earth
and fossilized there, waiting—
of imaginary deer, the philosopher’s favorite
toy, a chimerical figment of Death
an up-close, scythe-less form to study.

2

Age after age, we return, designing
different hypotheses,
different scenarios
to kill the deer in

a way that matters,
to pull its soul back to the living
again and again.
Unbreakable until broken. A poet, I—
desperate for my own genius, I—
turn to the place of thieves:
Standing before this graveyard, a sea of corpses reflecting stars
so realistic
I don’
t know
which side of the world

I belong to,

my pen becomes a shovel. I dig.
Sorry, I’m here to steal your dead deer. I hit my first body the same way a black hole announces itself, a tickling
warp in light.

A deer lies before me,

not as
a deer but
a vision,
a question.

It’
s big enough for

a pyre but small
enough to steal without being missed. I light the match. I pick up a handful of gray, chalky,
unclaimed truth.
I wonder
,

if
I sprinkle this ash into the dirt,
will something natural grow?
If something blossoms,
will
a bird unfurl from its petals?
Featherless fledgling covered in soot,
as ugly as it will be beautiful—
Is this the deer
I stole?