Eyes Of Deer

            The eyes of deer are so wide and cloudless that even the starlight on a new moon night makes them shine like beacons. I crawled on my hands and knees across a patch of forest for nine straight nights searching for a buck. By the ninth night I knew the pathways molded through the underbrush and could hear, far out where homes and suburbs spread, the deep moaning cries of abandoned and rusting automobiles. The buck never appeared, but once, just once, I heard an owl high in a tree above me answer those automobiles with its starlit, resonating call.