Atop the fabric of loose snow,
under snow clinging to the needles
of the pitch pines, the half-moon clefts of deer prints
angle past the frozen creek.
It was Hippocrates who first imagined that the seat
of emotions was not the heart,
that health sprang from an equal balance
of the humours: black bile, yellow bile,
blood, phlegm. The catheter remained
in place for two weeks following the prostatectomy,
and in a dream one night the stream of urine
became the same stream that trickled
through the hickory woods. My grandmother believed
that a salve of goat's rue and wild geraniums
cured psoriasis. I have read that dried deer antlers—
the dermis, the calcified cartilage, the bone—restores
general health and sexual energy. In deep winter
I carry corn-apple deer blocks into the woods
and leave them by the stream. Something unseen
gnaws at them. Something unseen leaves a scattering of grain.
The first time, home from the hospital,
I walked into the woods and stood for a long while
amid the redbuds, the blackjack oaks,
the sweetgums. In dead winter cold air
constricts the blood vessels, but for all that the heart
remains a bugle band of overwhelming feeling.
There I am kneeling before the half-moon clefts.
Surely the white-tail conjured itself out of falling snow,
took its few corporeal steps, and disappeared.