Contemplation Is Mourning by Tim Lilburn You lie down in the deer's bed. It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums because the body's touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses after a run. There are snowberries, fescue. This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy. Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert and winter of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and sounds felt through the gigantic walls.

Choose. Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body. The hills are the bones of hills. The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is ; to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed. Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this. You lie down in the deer's bed, in the green martyrion, the place where language buries itself, waiting place, weem.

You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool, nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost smell of last year's melted snow.