A deer comes to me to die

Compasses

Jon‘s what’s left.
The dead have swung their compasses
to dance with new magnetic disturbances. 

We loiterers skate on our vanities
to believe we matter enough to detain the dead—
why would they relish our loony gravities.
our grandiose heaps and depravities?

What book would they choose to earmark
when they can look out of billions of eyes?
All that we see we see for them, 
all that they see is seen for us.

Wounded ninety years ago, staggered here to die,
crossbow bolt of unwelcome tearing his tenacious heart,
he took a chosen number of years to ghost

to arrive at this particular doorstep, this walkway,
to deposit the question why,
to invite you to work with it as he had worked
with his terrible wound.

He could have been a deer, 
but he chose to be an augur
to auger into the hardwood of time
so that finally we might see we’re nothing like
our definitions, our claptrap names,
our polished misery, our swanniness.



—————————


This poem is based on an incident in my own life. 

A six-point stag died on my doorstep, and seeing bullet wounds in him I looked around my house for bullet holes, Then I called the state police. 
A state trooper reprised my own search for bullet holes and then said, You know, a deer can be wounded ten or even twelve miles away and then finds his way to some spot he remembered. 

Some spot he liked? I asked. Yeah, maybe so, the trooper said., 

Not unlike humans, I thiought.

The incidernt has haunted me.'
I don't know why it came to me as Jon's what's left. I have a friend called Jon. Perhaps I was thinking of him. 

I wondered if the stag's life had been like my own. I had been badly wouncded—emotionally—in the Hudson Valley as a boy and in old age I returned there to live, reliving again and again incidents that had wounded me, giving them different outcomes, gturning them over, poking them.

Why? I don;t know, but I think Frida Kahlo, who painted this image, Wounded Deer, giving the animal her own face, may have been doing something similar.