Road kill.

Actaeon ripped to gobbets by his hounds,
felled in the mazy paths of venery:
it was not like that. Where the dark abounds,
a five-point buck hit by an SUV
ghosted into my lane with car-wreck sounds,
huge, pale and cartwheeling like an empty
refrigerator box. An antlered gleam
caromed in fragments out of my high beam.

For whoso list to hunt--the hart, the hart--
I thought my Previa took him in her stride,
breasting the rain-slick road, always apart,
not tangled this way, fell and underside
so implicated in a single dart
of time, horn and steel dragging through the pied
landscape and the loud reek of viscera.
I set my hazards and walked back to where

The buck lay broken in the autumn rain,
so beautiful, the pouch of testicles
at ease in pure white fur, and a small stain
of blood at the mouth. I said canticles
of thanks to pure Diana once again:
the windshield had not gone to particles;
the buck had not mounted and, floundering,
killed me with sharp hooves of engendering.

High on the cannon bones I set both hands,
intending to drag him out of the way--
my chance should not become another's chance--
but saw as I did so that he stirred weakly:
the net of breath still held. I lost my balance,
my hands gloved in his musk, and staggered free
of that black gaze diamonded by the rill
at the curb. I could not find even the little

he sought in me, who lacked a simple weapon
to end him with, so that his death was slow,
a long indifference, like the rescission
of splattered leaves, a passion in dumb-show;
and I was wounded down to the white bone,
but somehow quickened by my watching, too,
as if a god had bearded my night-black car
with long white hairs embedded in the rubber.