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Norwegian Deer Trails by Rob Cook

October 1, 2012 Contributed By: Rob Cook

(for Matthew Savoca, 1945-1994)

Mid-March and the sky still buried
in the front yard,

I look out the window at the deer leading daylight
back into the woods—

Followed all winter by their own
tracks, they must know where the wind sleeps

and which tree the snow is
coming from.

*

Today on the phone to Norway,
my cousin’s voice ruined
by AIDS and the freezing long-distance,

I kept slicing carrots and zucchini
and mixing Dr. Sorge’s Blood Rejuvenation
Powder and Rose Hip Formula with apple juice,

forcing the sludge down into my body
starved into the shapes of hypothermia
from three years
of Nardil and low blood sugars,

the background tape of the homeopathic maverick
repeating:

Even single-celled organisms
turn to wood after eating pizza.

You must renounce white flour.
You must stop eating glue that tastes good.

*

March 23, 11 pm, 32 degrees,
my cousin talking to me in shreds,

I’m kept awake by winter dying under the blanket,
the thousand miles of bread and stone in my bowels,

and the deer leaving pellets of raisin meat,
the same wind that’s been trying
to eat since the Stone Age.

This year my cousin found himself a warm body
out in the sickness of snow.

Soon they will each strip down to their wilderness.

They will feed each other the flesh they’ve lost,
and whisper about the naked sleep
approaching from Denmark.

Together, they will learn to crawl again
over the hard tyrannosaurus frost.

Return to table of contents for Issue 6 Fall 2012

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2012

Further Reading

This is the part
by Francine Witte

where I believe that it was the goddamn fault of the night willow, that if it hadn’t been so blacked out like it was, bowed so brushy and low, you could have seen your way around it. Could have driven a clean road home like you do every night, except this one.

TIME an entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick

Time grants us the simple goodness of life, but also takes it away. We change and we witness change in the world, and both types of flux occur within time. While we live the world exists for us, and though none can say if the world ceases to exist when we’ve ceased to exist, there […]

As You Learn of Elk, Elk Learn of You
by Laurinda Lind

This poem was nominated for The Best of the Net. Elkhips leaning any way they want since up to the day of discovery,   their word is pivot. There’s a reason  bones are like books, and why   you breathe your air and live in them.  Or elk stomach as a church where charms help […]

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