ACT I

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Oh Deer

"The deer is patience, the deer is what we see standing in the woods, half its jaw shot off, just staring. You ought to kill it now but you lift it into the back of the pickup. At home you pack the broken bone with mud.

Healing, she moves towards you. Shy, she rubs her head against your leg. What I've loved in myself and others.

Is in the dream I have of this deer, though she was real: she came out of the woods bleeding, she knew how to die but healed. The deer that walked one day back into the woods.

Is standing by a pond now, alert, in a wash sunlight. How quietly she stands there as if there were no way to not belong in the world, as if it were this easy."

-Laurie Sheck