This is the second day the deer is dead,
it’s stomach tight and floated.
The morning cool for all alive,
then for the recently slain
on the side of the road — baking.
The pustules grow like three Tetons.
The pastels begone in the fog.
The smell has yet been held within.
The rented van has the A/C on.

The driver pulls over on the twice paved shoulder.
He checks and locks the lift gate.
A few seconds later he sees the body.
The flies are moving in today.
He thinks, he chuckles, he squirms.
They buzz around, the eggs are laid.
He warms his arm in the sun and the wind
of the open driver-side window.
Healthy now, breathing in, another day’s rot.

Who’s to say? Perhaps prolonging life
is his strategic plot and plan.
A man is a troll with the moon in his hand. 
What can I hope for? I hope
his pathway flooded half the year,
so in egress or ingress he must hop
along submerged slippy stones,
like a child on the third day of camping.

I hope his door is the wide side of a bridge,
and the bridge, wide and long.
I hope his home between two thriving towns.
Two towns with enough going on
that the highway is deserted.
The highway deserted enough
that the drone of commuting is extinct.
The extinction long enough
that the feeler-tendrils of connection
buzz in the loamy dirt and shoot

into the atmosphere (not so high) like cicadas
in their seventh year. Like hawk-moths
and burrowing owls, pollinating the tall stalk
of the agave at the very breach of life.
I hope all this, not for a difficult life,
but for more. That if we try not to hold it
in our cheeks, tight, red and ready to burst,
if we let more in and out, then maybe
the bloating stops.