A Country Place

 

(Near isolated house, dancers in light brown sweatshirts and white sweatpants, half with antlers and all with big ears, peer from woods or rise in tall grass.)

 

Some of your kind killed us

but they were part of a vanishing species.

Terrified, alert,

we brought ourselves out of the woods

to the edge of that fenced rectangle

of variety and tenderness

your forethought had created.

​

You couldn’t move like us,

so you learned to concentrate.

A few strides of ground were imprisoned

until they yielded a fortune in browse.

Dazzled, we abandoned familiar places

but got in late, snapping

the dried stems of the season.

Then packs came.

In one nightmare fanged ice

formed over snow we’d break through.

After that, even the curs starved.

Yarded in evergreens, we stripped

spruce and cedar branches we could reach.

​

Dozing in the hollows that we melted,

we dreamed of combers of growth

we could barely push through

or recalled the lights of your cover

and that raging prosthesis.

Long after you'd be vertebrae

we’d continue to escape.

​

Little you did made immediate sense.

Just showing up got the woods buzzing,

righting a mailbox or passed out in a hammock.

It's summer and where are you? The fence is down

and there's no lost tool in the high grass

or word of black-nailed curses rising to heaven.

​

(All dashing and, as one, bounding away.)