Deer King
I cross the bridge and find you
soaked in dew, overlooking the clearing.
Doe eyes and roots crowning your antlers,
you wait for me as though an epiphany.
I can’t see you as born from a flaw, thrown
into poison ivy, unarmoured and without fangs.
I don’t know how to be loved by a man,
mastered the art of kneeling down
to be cast a stone-eye and choked with
an absence of feeling I cannot name.
Here the warm mist rises up as a rug.
You pierce a distance with your hand,
my arms sink down, drowning the elbows.
Your knee drops into the grass, like my father’s
in his final act before the fall. I was pure
vitriol and fretting fawn, fleeing
but rammed into the soil, legs tied with weed.
Like this I fit right into your Cupid's bow.
I’m not afraid of dying anymore, but love,
love strangled me tighter than his grip.
You know everything. You’re not a god,
just less human and more earth,
growing flowers from a ruptured cleft.
As you lower on my head a branched wreath,
I say yes, I’ll love you for a very long time,
maybe even longer.