Deer Skull

1 I keep placing my hands over my face, the fingertips just resting on the place where I feel my eyebrows and the fine end of a bone. My eyes are covered with the blood of my hands, my palms hold my jaws. I do this at dinner. My daughter asks Are you all right? and by a common miracle when I smile she knows I am. 2 I ask her what she will do after we eat. Sleep she tells me. But I will clean the deer skull, wash it. 3 You gave me this skull in the woods told me to bring it clean and tell the story I had told you before, about how the deer had come to me, and I said I would. 4 And I put this skull on an old newspaper, pulled the lower part of the jaws free, touched it first carefully, as if it would fall apart in my hands, the bone paper- thin, and then I saw I could scrub, so brushed the surface with steel and my fingers and more and more this surface became familiar to me. 5 I wanted to see the lines of it what it would be if it had been polished by the wind, the water, and my hands, these agents making the skull more itself. Slowly I was not afraid at all and my fingers went into the deepest holes of this thing, not afraid for myself or it, feeling suddenly as if cleaning this small fragment of earth away from the crevices inside was like loving. 6 But it was when I touched the place where the eyes were that I knew this was the shell of the deer that had lived here, this was this deer and not this deer, her home and now empty of her, but not empty of her, I knew also, not empty of her, as my hands trembled. 7 And in that instant remembered you had been in that body of that deer dying, what does it feel like to be a deer dying, the death consumes you like birth, you are nowhere else but in the center. 8 Remembering those gentle deer that watched me as I wept, or the deer that leapt as if out of my mind, when I saw speaking there in that green place the authority of the heart and the deer of the woods where my feet stood, stared at me until I whispered to her and cried at her presence. 9 And when I cleaned the skull I washed myself and sat my body half out of the water and put my hands again over my face, my fingers edging the bone over my eyes, and I thought how good this feels and this is a gesture you make. 10 Tell this story of the deer’s skull you asked quietly and so I came in my own time to put these words carefully here slowly listing each motion on this thin paper as fragile and as tough as knowledge. 1978