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Waumandee

By Mark Wunderlich b. 1968 Mark Wunderlich

A man with binoculars

fixed a shape in the field

and we stopped and saw

the albino buck browsing

in the oats—white dash

on a page of green,

flick of a blade

cutting paint to canvas.

It dipped its head

and green effaced the white,

bled onto the absence that

the buck was—animal erasure.

Head up again, its sugar legs

pricked the turf, pink

antler prongs brushed at flies.

Here in a field was the imagined world

made visible—a mythical beast

filling its rumen with clover

until all at once it startled,

flagged its bright tail—

auf Wiedersehen, surrender—

and leapt away—

a white tooth

in the closing mouth of the woods.

Source: Poetry (March 2009).

Biography

Mark Wunderlich’s collections of poetry include The Anchorage (1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude (2004). As J.D. McClatchy said of Wunderlich’s debut, “The Anchorage bravely takes up the raw mess of desire and pain, the cold ache of longing and loss, and in sleek and searing poems exposes the way we live now to the larger powers of the racing heart and the radiant imagination.” Wunderlich’s . . .

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