A poem of place

It’s not that I believe or don’t believe
in Jesus or Mohammed or the ’63 Packers, my faith
these days is that most crows sound like a claw hammer
pulling boards from an old shed, inside of which
a doll’s head floats in a can of paint full of rain,
what was rain but is not rain any longer, or snow fell
through the hole in the roof no one was alive to patch,
not for the year before I bought the place, there was a deer
in the bedroom the day I took possession, too weak
to stir its antlers in my direction when I pushed
against the pile of books holding the door closed,
it had jumped through a window and couldn’t think
to jump out, I took every door off
every hinge that led to life as it had known it,
after an hour it walked out, the sky turned dark
and I’m tired of trying to say things about stars,
they’re only suns, every one of them too far away
for warmth or to read a map by that would take me
where I wanted to go if I knew, and I asked
the house, were you going to kill that deer,
and the house as I recall said absolutely