Doe, Late Summer
Blood striped the yellow leaves with plea.
We crashed through the prickly woods to see.
The hunters fled - we saw our chance.
The doe went down in a red leaf dance.
No motion in the mound.
No struggle to defy.
My brother's rifle found
her quiet eye.
Forest sister, your swoon of death
transports to human breath.
No thicket hiding can lose you to the coal:
I carry your redness in my soul.
* * *
A Force of Dying
(Of the murder, by stabbing, of a
family in
Chino, California, 1983.)
The whole wall,
plaid with
blood.
The whole
wall
taken for evidence.
In court, it must melt hearts.
A little boy's left whistling
in his
throat, stabbed there.
All his
family and a friend
who slept
over, gone.
Killings make
all
literature
false.
He will retreat to a different dying,
mute in his
suffering. Hear no evil,
see no
evil. No good foster parent
will put
this humpty-dumpty
together
again.
This is what we imagine.
But
witches, too, come back
from the
oven alive.
Perhaps we will grow him to fight
in an army
– a special force –
to teach a
way of dying to boys
who never
once have seen
the brilliance of red geysers.