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Now reading
The Antler Tree
Late at night I braid the helix
from floor to ceiling-skeletal
thicket of deciduous horns,
pillar of prongs, of cambers and angles-
as I drink aged whiskey to the spit
of pitchwood embers in Montana, autumn,
the Rockies cross-stitched
in tamarack yellows, and bull elk
bugling their shrill stake
to territory, to harem. The trek
comes back distinct as moon-
silhouetted pine boughs, a rack of antlers
on a ridgetop miles off. It begins with a boy,
with a map he unfolds to trace for me
secret trails to his enchanted land, his trove,
the mother lode of abandoned bone.
One by miraculous one, we found them
almost always rocking on the arc
of main beam, crown tines forked
like hazel dowsing rods peeled white-
widespread fingers gleaming
above green billows of grass
beneath aspen, as if beckoning us
from a hundred paces away. It was easy
to imagine them lightning-
chiseled out of jack pine, a wilderness
wind scattering dry limbs
popped clean from sockets. Some so freshly dropped,
it was easy to believe shamans
laid them in our random paths
seconds ahead of us, to believe grace
a sculpted substance-textured, with heft.
Shoulders galled, collarbones aching, feet blistered
after twelve uphill, talused miles,
we unlashed each other from antlered packs
and reveled in the weightlessness that tripped
light-headed leaps over treetops, a floating
those trophy bulls must know
shaking both beams free. I hover often
in that dream, looking down at you
finding a matched set of 6-points
seconds apart-their rosettes, saffron
full moons over August barley,
their scarred tines like scrimshaw
rubbed to an ivory gloss
against sapling pines. You grappled one
gnarled base in each hand
hoisting them with a 12-year-old's wild joy.
Each time I build this tree, I learn,
as a blind child with braille
might learn, the unique interlockings
of a magical language. Tines
clack and rattle into place
like lines we recited along trails
to let bears know the poets
were coming for bone. These antlers, Matt,
having grown branch by branch
more potent. Parts of ourselves
we burnish, then abandon
with hope they'll be gathered
by those who'll keep them whole,
those who'll hear the invisible
clash and clatter through lodgepole-your echoes
making the heart of this hunter pound hard.
For Matt Hansen-In Memoriam-
and to his book of poems, CLEARING