When the previously withheld faces grew tough as flax
or softened into pliant pine in the umber wood, inclined
together, numerous, when the cobble crushed underfoot,
and pistachios cracked in their shells, grown heavy,
grown consummate among the nibs of leaves, then curious
seemed the stars, those nether eyes which scrutinized
each shape that stirred against the unlit trunks of trees.
He could say he knew the men he did not know. Arrived
in the cedar grove and parted, sated with little effort,
or left unsatisfied, ruminating upon such unfamiliar flesh
across the glade. Silent the approach, a fawn, fluid
through the damp grass, the current in the full creek
surrounding the mossy rocks, pulling them a spell
a little ways downstream, inevitable their deposit.
Thus he would peer the woods, and quarry eluded him,
sloughed that lustrous hide and slipped innominate away.
Retraction: there were times he stood the corsair’s nip,
gained midnight’s reticent stroke, the haphazard coitus
of loaded collegians stumbling the poison oak. Hermit
thrush or Wilson’s snipe. Something bolts the dark,
flushed from the thick rushes, that most temporal cover.