Classic Poem

All night
in the thickets of the heart
on the corn snow
cradling a rifle
I followed the blunt rosettes
thorned with their toenail marks
of dogs that run the deer. On

deep into someone's dreams
my snowshoes crept like lenses
of an old scholar across a page
following footnotes
adding my own. But the trees—

I had almost grasped how the songs
of trees come from beneath the page
and break out through it
and throw upward onto a blue stillness
their balanced figures
of antlers and crouching dogs
and shambling Eumenides.











By permission of the author.