I learned a couple of years ago with my family
in the mountains, in a house where
no one had lived for a while, so the deer had kind of
taken over the property.
And they would come right up to the windows really,
and I was working pretty hard editing this manuscript.
And it seemed like when I would look up deep
in thought, suddenly, there was a being
from another world looking at me or not looking at me.
And so when I came back to Tucson, and a little bit
when I was there, I started to sort of explore
that deer thing, and the symbol that also was in the metaphors
that it was bringing, and this was
the first of those deer poems which have now
become a pretty big project.
So I've been having some fun looking at topographic maps
and deer migration patterns, and they've
taken me back to where I grew up in Los Alamos
where there were a pair of albino deer living there
when I was young, being tracked, and many deer
connections I seem to have.
So I want to read this one that made it into Blinking Ephemeral
Valentine, and then we have a way to erase all of this,
and let Mary Jo set the stage for you.
So this one is called "National Monument."
Wish yourself inside the ornamental deer.
Veneer of and spots floating in the reservoir.
Water breaking the edges.
In the time lapse of drift forever,
a lasso across your shoulder, and in your pocket,
a fly's wing on which to sketch your SOS--
a ribbed dog.
Things you will need--
night glasses, cerulean stain, best gloves,
any number of ladders.
Stand up in a black hollow, multiple sounds
of a perfect ocean under which you
believe an incandescent carousel circles.
When you have finished, hold your reflection
up to the keyhole.
Kits and toy soldiers in the ragweed a crossing,
says so the bullet sprayed sign.
Shape of antlers or black branches, wind making it
disappear.
Here the poem whistles an elk to the shoreline.
Whistle, whistle, and another, another are cue of hold onto.