Mark Wunderlich

A man with binoculars fixed a shape in the field and we stopped and saw the albino buck browsing in the oats—white dash on a page of green, flick of a blade cutting paint to canvas. It dipped its head and green effaced the white, bled onto the absence that the buck was—animal erasure. Head up again, its sugar legs pricked the turf, pink antler prongs brushed at flies. Here in a field was the imagined world made visible—a mythical beast filling its rumen with clover until all at once it startled, flagged its bright tail— auf Wiedersehen, surrender— and leapt away— a white tooth in the closing mouth of the woods.

Oh, Unreadable One, why have you done this to your dumb creature? Why have you chosen to punish the coyote rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap, shucked the fur from his tail and fashioned it into a scabby cane? Why have you denuded his face, tufted it, so that when he turns he looks like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile? The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low, and without fur, his now visible pizzle is a sad red protuberance, his hind legs the backward image of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped. Why have you unhoused this wretch from his one aesthetic virtue, taken from him that which kept him from burning in the sun like a man? Why have you pushed him from his world into mine, stopped him there and turned his ear toward my warning shout?

They brought it. It was brought from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle the latest and most final armful. Up up over the head, hold it, hold it high it held the gazer’s gaze, it held hope, did hold it. Through the stubble of September, on shoulders aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow, it was said, something winged, hollow, though pulsing, freed from the field where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted to be found and bound with cord. It had limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers. Fingers and a face peering from the stalks, shuttered in the grain, closed, though just a kernel a shut corm. They brought him and autumn rushed in, tossed its cape of starlings, tattered the frost-spackled field.