Waumandee

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.