Coyotes had yanked her entrails out,
doe’s wounds still bleeding, their kill that fresh.
Her upcast eye lay open,
and not yet dimmed, invited him
to whisper fire, birth, spirit.
He was certain he could conjure more,
though in fact what he celebrated
was having to conjure nothing.
Words came unbeckoned, so it tempted him
to consider himself a visionary,
the scope of whose language demanded no effort,
a man with a gift to read nature.
That evening, the weather remaining warm,
he opened a kitchen window
to a hermit thrush’s evensong.
Any visionary would use that sound.
If, however, the dead deer gave him
celebratory words, the bird
perversely summoned dark ones,
equally real and maybe more so:
stubble, ashes, dust, dead leaves.
He instantly acknowledged
he hadn’t seen or read a thing
if he meant to use those verbs precisely.
The reach of his speech? Imaginary