After Another Argument I’ve Come to Regret

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

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

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

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

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

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

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