SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE
Later that year, when the whitetails’ plague began,
we remembered the early months of our own.
Back when they had looked at us
with something more than ordinary deer curiosity,
the way they studied us every day for months.
Not the usual prey-animal timidity and flight in their look.
It had countenance, expression,
a visage that might have had compassion in it,
or worry. Maybe wonder. Fascination. Possibly fear.
Now their time had arrived. Soon we found
them everywhere on the mountain, their disease
hemorrhagic, always a biteless wound low on the belly,
an ooze of viscera looking boiled in blood. A few
even came to the house to die, one going down
by the wood shed; another, its head on the front porch step.
We smelled her the night we came home
from three weeks alone at camp—hiding, in our way.
She lay on a slick of putrid liquefaction, in a doe-shaped lake
of maggots that glistened in the light of the moon.
I poked my pointer finger knuckle deep
and felt the nuzzle-squirm and soft gnaw.
No, the sky did not weep; it was the dry season.
Wind did not wail the death stench away,
but yes, moonlight glistened on the maggots.
The deer had looked at us from thirty feet away.
They watched us until we left,
and we had watched them watch, the lucky ones.
They think something is wrong with the people, we said.
About that time the biting flies that would kill them
began to lay their millions of eggs.
HANDSHAKE
Lavishly robed and turbaned, the palmist
foretold, in 2018, that I would go a couple of years
without shaking a hand, but it was only cancer,
a welcome mat laid out for the pandemic.
The last man I shook hands with was a surgical
oncologist. It was the day I decided,
despite the particular lethality of the tumor
he was sure he’d gotten all of,
that I would forego radiation.
Fuck that shit, I said mildly, and he replied
Fair enough. Then my wife went into full
Rocky Mountain woman prepper mode
and I went into foul-mouthed misanthropic
fulminatory merriment. The self-righteous
churchman protesting a mask mandate—
may his children see him someday as I described him then.
Someday I’ll write that poem, but this one’s about
the palmist, who shook my hand and turned it over
in hers and told me I’d go a couple of years
without shaking hands then said there was distortion
in the spheres too violent to penetrate.
I have wondered ever since if she meant
to spare me what she could almost perceive?
I thought, such a man thing, the hand shake,
such nonsense, reading a palm. Then I thought,
the poison that kills the poison is still poison.
Years passed. Today I shook the hand
of the man who hauled and installed
the new propane tank. I wish there was a hell
that wasn’t on earth, as it is our heaven.
One thing to love about palmistry
is the lack of algorithmic aggregation.
What shit shows up in your inbox
when you search for your own personal cancer.
You can isolate for the rest of your life and still die,
infect a thousand others and never get it yourself.
But after I shook hands with the propane man,
I went in and, with a disinfectant wipe, wiped,
as I have for some years now, my own hands.
ALL RIGHT
For longer than is comfortable,
I stand wet from the shower
regarding myself in the mirror.
I think I look all right
but wonder what that means.
Except for the silver thatch
right between the nipples,
the body’s hair is dark as ever.
Also bodies shimmer when wet
and my body is wet but I reach not
for the towel. Reach not’s all right,
and there’s a droplet dribbling down
from the belly button I can admire.
Still, I will never spell all right
as a single word, neither seven
or eight letters long. My face is another
all right story with wrinkles
and baggy eyes. I like the old way
of spelling. Everyone’s giving up
on all right, someday there will be only a few
who still believe it’s wrong
to write all right alright or allright.
Almost funny, an uncommon phrase
that also means what there is to settle for.
