The Story
He has killed, the man, a doe.
To be sure, it was an accident, but there was
one private moment, just before
he slammed on the brakes, when
he hit the gas. Just to see.
It is dusk. It will be years before he makes his confession.
The eyes of things that shine in the dark
have started to shine.
Her body blinks in the hazards, her face still
splashed with astonishment:
to die might have been
as effortless as living.
Cars move from left to right
with their unnumbered passengers.
Do people still sweep the woods,
calling out the names of their daughters,
or have they inherited some other tradition?
Like aphids in a black field
porch lights stipple the black hillside.
Easy-breezy. A cinch.
The man likes peaches best.
He sits in the passenger seat now, eating one.
Like you, he has heard the story
of the toothless human
who made a pair of dentures
with a deer’s teeth
then ate the deer with them.
Just to see. He sucks the pit.
In the center of every being
glows the cold core:
orchards of white peaches,
snow angels in irradiated ash,
a pair of small hands enfolded
by a larger pair of hands, guided
to do something they have never done before.
Mushroom
He holds a microphone to the mushroom
to see what it has to say
but the mushroom's voice is
so soft . . . even when he presses his ear
to its gills, he only hears
the forests’ birds’ cries dampen
like an argument
heard through a crack
beneath a bedroom door.
The argument
enters the mushroom
and moves around in there.
The argument never stops;
It only spreads
further and further until you cannot
hear it anymore.
Every sound is like this.
He will carry to his death the faintest echoes
of his mother’s cries
giving birth to him.
A particle of cries
is still in him
moving around in there.
He puts the mushroom
in his mouth next to
the cries
so they can speak
to each other.
