“You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.”

I swiveled my head then to find a deer
camouflaged by the leaves no longer there
“what should I do with someone’s silhouette?”

She merely rotates for me her mask
as if to bring something
born in one world back in another

Up from the gripping feet
through the twigs of the crooked legs … leaning
                 tensing the tail and ringing the bones

The two who stood there
and the two who saw them said
not what they said