The deer licks salt on a saltlick.

I sit adjacent playing courter,

begging them come closer.

They look at me with doleful eyes,

answer me with looks

that cross and fill the space

of tension between dunes and eyes;

and over grassy hills and dewy blackness and moonlight.

They answer me with wet fear

and I answer them, from across the fields,

with impatient kindness, and beckon them

with a thin line of a smile and eyes that implore

and call like infants with deep voices

Yearning both to be the other

or perhaps only one does

In free running one might find peace

and experience the joy of flight,

the joy one only finds when chill night air

and failing wakingness conspire to rush you home

like a kidnapped babe who has not yet woken;

who cannot run through the woods.

The conspiracy is lost to men

seeing reason and forms of things

And say that is why it is

And say that is why we cannot be

And say that man never runs

And say that we are doomed to die

And know that within our mind lies an aetherial lock

And know that there is no easy key

And know that in the eyes of a deer licking salt

And know that in those woods lies freedom

And know that in our mind lies that freedom

And the heart beats

And the flesh tears long

And the hands strike earth like hooves

And the hair flows like antlers

And all at once we fly

And through the branches we wip

And our humanity rests like a corpse on our antlers

And our horns scour the sky

And we run forever in the pines

and a deer looks back with murky black eyes,

that bespeak the ancient wisdom of primal forever.

they look at us with pity and fear, for they know,

we seek freedom

but we are doomed instead

to live as men