Classic Poem

A man with binoculars
fixed a shape in the field
and we stopped and saw

the albino buck browsing
in the oats — white dash
on a page of green,

flick of a blade
cutting paint to canvas.
It dipped its head

and green effaced the white,
bled onto the absence that
the buck was — animal erasure.

Head up again, its sugar legs
pricked the turf, pink
antler prongs brushed at flies.

Here in a field was the imagined world
made visible — a mythical beast
filling its rumen with clover

until all at once it startled,
flagged its bright tail —
auf Wiedersehen , surrender —

and leapt away —
a white tooth
in the closing mouth of the woods.