I’ve hung a severed deer leg in the tree behind the house
_           _ so that the dogs, sweet demons, don’t get into it again

and return to gnawing the hair and gristle and rotten flesh
_           _ from the bone. When you and I fight, and sometimes

we fight all the time—politics, toilet seats, and the truer
_           _ contentions they stand in for—I want to walk to the tree

and see again how dark appetites have forced me to discard
_           _ a limb in the crook of an alder at the base of a hill

so crossed with game trails they appear as stretch marks
_           _ on a giant, hay-colored breast. The proverbs

I remember say tenderness, mercy. Make it the leg
_           _ of a child, the perfect black hoof become a pale

sickle of what was such new skin. And the dogs no less
_           _ hungry, no less ready to take their meal.