In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• 122 deer deer: OE de -or, wild animal: to stir up, blow, breathe; related to animal, anima, soul I’ve been afraid of hitting a deer so many this time of year down from the ridges searching for food, water Love. I hate that hunting season is mating season. So all month I’ve been telling a love story on myself and a couple I love who are coming undone, how years ago the three of us as new poets and they as new lovers were returning from a reading on the Russian River a midnight climbing Highway One I’m climbing now at noon to her new cabin having just received the news of your death. “He swerved to miss it and the fawn turned back.” Coming around this steepest, most twisted curve the buck was just standing there pushed up against the high bluff, his eyes flashing red in the lights and, slow motion, I had time to say aloud oh honey don’t do it. But not enough time to brake or space to swerve because he did do it, just stepped right out in front of us, his rack out to the moon and starset over the Pacific. “Do you know deer come down the canyon into your yard at sunrise?” you wrote me once of a night or dawn you spent in the field opposite my mother’s house “just watching it.” The buck was dead and so was my station wagon. We pushed them over to the narrow strip on the ocean side, that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. I made the bed in the back for the lovers with the maroon and gold quilt the old Mendocino man gave my husband just before we came undone • 123 patched by his sister from their childhood dresses and pants. And with clarity, leaving no room for protesting chivalry I lay down in my bag with the buck bleeding hundreds of feet straight down to the crashing sea. You were a man I could have married but that you were married. Love that is poetry ignited between us so holy infidelity was not a possibility. I made the bed in the back of my car for the couple, you and your wife and the family you kept making and have carried you all this way through the dark to this fawn so in love too she’s turning back into you. —For G., for the Baker-Roberdeaus, for William Stafford, October 1993 ...

Share