Chris Dombrowski

I tracked it through the one mind of  the woods. Its hoofprints pressed in snow were smallish hearts. Buck fawn: he let me come so near, take aim. Crouched against a fir, I was anything. Bush, stump, doe in estrus he could rut. Not his maimer, though, not his final thought. He stared me down until I shot him: low. Then the forest forgot he’d ever been. Nascent, there were signs: bonechip, spoor, frail hair. But no memory, wounded, wants to die. He hid in the dark timber, twice crossed the creek. Finally he lay heaving out last breaths. Dusk-cast shadow, he died where he was made. A bite of  heart sustains but is not him.

All day the ravens shit the buck whitetail back onto his antlers, the thick arcing tines graffitied with undigested tendons. Coyote- dragged, draped in a squawking garment that rises tattered when redtail-harried — revealing ribs, links of spine, tongue-clean sockets — and falls, in patches, back, stitched with wingsound. A feathered hush. Says you will go down in the dirt. First the four-leggeds ferrying your shape across the slough, yipping nothing resembling a name, large birds then like lamp-drawn moths, before the six-limbed elders arrive as one mind, as shifting soil, to polish what’s left, forsaking only the inedible brain.

Here comes dawn and nothing rosy about her fingers — stove-flame blue and some hand must’ve turned the burner on: the little tongues licking, gradually, the teapot of  us aboil, cooking off a giardia of  stars, the dregs of our night- mares. Who will place his fingers in the nailmarks, come near enough to smell death in its hair? Already we’ve some of us slid back into our bodies, restirring the air our breaths stirred all night — whoever we are while we sleep — and gone about believing we are here. Ambulance sirens assure us, a plum’s sour skin, what’s become of  the poppies, dried all but greenless, etcetera. But the yearling child reaching into the lineaments of  sun lancing between his crib bars — how might this shame us, that they seem to seem graspable to him?