You Carried Your Antlers Like A Crown

For the buck who fell in the Adirondacks last fall

You were alive in the cold morning. You breathed the same air I breathed. You drank from water I have never found. You knew trails older than any road I ever traveled.

I did not take you lightly. I take you into my body now the way the forest takes its own fallen — not with grief, not without it, but with the understanding that everything feeds everythin…