Why Deer Fear Everything But Cars

It is the nature of all flighty herbivores to be prophets.

Their gateways through time

Masticated by machines,

Regurgitated into condos;

Their sacred rivers

And secret desire paths

Welling with hot asphalt

As blood wells in a flesh wound—

They find new avenues for soothsaying.

No more do they peer into the future.

Now the future comes to them.

When I slammed into a molting buck

An hour from Orlando

Just a little over the speed limit,

Windshield skinning fresh velvet,

I think he wanted to be hit—

Not to die,

But to be hit,

A very different thing.

In the rearview mirror he was gone.

He left nothing in his place.

I can only wonder what he saw

As he staggered back into the forest

Drunk on pain—

What visions of death

Did my highbeams brand into him?

What paths branched like his new antlers,

Like blooming neurons

Coming to life with enormous sensation

A deer can't get anywhre else?

The herbivore's way of fortune-telling

Starts with making a decision.

From there a thousand fractal futures

Burst before the eyes,

Each shard containing

A way the creature might die.

For these tender seers,

Valhalla lies

Beneath an SUV.

That monster could not kill me, thinks the buck,

Concussed but too animal to know it.

I dare the next one to try.

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