Calling

the sound of deer calling 

There are ways of naming the wound.

There are ways of entering the dream.
The way a painter enters a studio:

                                                        To spill.

 Dead doe lying in the rain

    on the shoulder
    in the gravel

I see your stiff leg

    in the headlights
    by the roadside

Dead doe lying in the rain

~ Gary Snyder

Long Hair

Hunting Season

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They
do various things which irresistibly draw men near them;
each one selects a certain man. The Deer shoots the man,
who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home
and eat it. Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and
hides in there, but the man doesn't know it. When
enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all
at once. The men who don't have Deer in them will
also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.
This is called "takeover from inside."

Deer Trails:

Deer Trails:

Deer trails run on the side hills
        cross country access roads
        dirt ruts to bone-white
        board house ranches,
        tumbled down.

Waist high through manzanita,
Through sticky, prickly, crackling
        gold dry summer grass.

Deer trails lead to water,
Lead sideways all ways
Narrowing down to one best path –
And split –
And fade away to nowhere.

Deer trails slide under freeways
        slip into cities
        swing back and forth in crops and orchards
        run up the sides of schools!

Deer spoor and crisscross dusty tracks
Are in the house: and coming out the walls:

And deer bound through my hair.

~ Gary Snyder 

The Wounded Deer

I have a woman’s face
but I’m a little stag,
because I had the balls
to come this far into the forest,
to where the trees are broken.
The nine points of my antlers
have battled
with the nine arrows in my hide.

I can hear the bone-saw
in the ocean on the horizon.
I emerged from the waters
of the Hospital for Special Surgery.
It had deep blue under-rooms.

And once, when I opened my eyes
too quickly after the graft,
I could see right through
all the glass ceilings,
up to where lightning forked
across the New York sky
like the antlers of sky-deer,
rain arrowing the herd.

Small and dainty as I am
I escaped into this canvas,
where I look back at you
in your steel corset, painting
the last splash on my hoof.

~ Pascale Petite