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I don't know if I'm sleeping here or only dying and then coming back alive.
 In these woods, where I am searching for my deer brother, disbelieving his
message of death, this is a death-dream. A death-dream is what I wake
into. A death-dream is purgatory. I've opened up foxes, worn their skin as
my skin. I've bled bears. I've built houses in the sky where birds
drifted. I've built houses in a lake and sank upward with fish. None of
them are brothers and my brother is deer-gone, the note he delivered when
I first woke to this death-dream was a black spot on white paper. The
moment I began dying.
In these woods, there is nothing simple.
Between death-dreams I have non-death dreams. The first non-death dream I
had was of waking in Antarctica, my lips going blue. There was ice and
penguins. I was shaking. I woke into a death-dream half-buried in the cold
ground, a patch of birds chattering in the branches above me, the mocking
ghost-outlines of my brother's deer-daughters knitting their
death-blankets with pale hands.
In the first non-death dream my veins were blue, the sky was white and the
penguins faded into stalks of trees. When I re-dream this, when I close my
eyes and die again, I will change the penguins to deer, make them a stand
of hooves holding still around my body, and I will know that they are my
deer-brothers, that they want me to live, that in their mouths or hooves
there is no message of death waiting to be yawned. I will change the sky
to sunrise and it will bruise my heart with warmth. The sun will open and
my skin will glow. I won't wake half-buried in the ground but
half-unburied from this purgatory, this hide-and-seek that my deer-brother
and I are playing in these lost woods.
I will re-dream this first non-death dream and wake into almost being alive.
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