The white deer appeared on the road to his sister
As she returned from looking for him.
We look for signs everywhere. There was the wrecked car.
A lost shoe. And mystery.
He has been gone over seven days, then nine, then now.
Somewhere in the woods, in the rain, in the forever
Of the spinning map of his mind.
The mind hungers for water over rocks,
The companionship of trees
And how light and the winds play together against
The skin of the earth.
All we have is the evidence left in his tracks:
A favored brother in a house without a father,
A boy who liked cars and dinosaurs,
A man without a map who loved his mother,
A phantom who convinced him to run
From a story in which he no longer saw himself.
It must have been something like this
As he sunk down into the earth
To know himself again as earth
As he began to hear himself dream again:
First it was the deer’s heart that changed him,
How it made a song
Like a lullaby
In a time long before there were human words
To hurt him.
The song memorized him.
Then those luminous eyes that could see through the night,
The tender ears turning toward each even imperceptible sound.
That nose a silky antenna, the graceful being
Who could leap any obstacle of fear or shame
Or for the wild joy of it.
I am a white deer, he said, as he escaped through the trees.
I am the first light of awakening and the last light of leaving.
Then no one, not even the haunting, could find him.
