TRAGIC VISION AND BEYOND

Is that the full moon and its dark bruise-like markings,

or the shadow of a man in a slouch hat with crumpled brim

looking in at our blackness through a round window

beyond which lies a flat buckwheat-flour light?

There's really no question: simply, the one it is

"looks like," "reminds me of" the one it's not.

It's as though some great hunter who was also a great singer

sang: "I lay in wait all of a night and a day and a night

for the young deer to move, trying not to fall into a dream

of her sweet fat. Then I could wait no longer:

was she a demon, never blinking, stiller than a rock?

I notched my arrow and crept up, waiting for her to bound

beyond me, tasting the disappointment to come

if she should sniff me too soon. But she

never stirred and I came close enough to grab her heart

in my fist. She was just shadow among the tree trunks

and all my strength against sleep had been for nothing.

I was asleep and dreaming from the start. I the hunter

was a dream my hunger had, a dead stock standing in the forest

a night and a day and a night." And his song was deeply loved,

the most intoxicating song, but now there's no one left

who knows it because his whole race, all twenty of the people,

died the end of that summer in the drought.