The Offspring of the Manuscript Defined as Poem

The Offspring of the Manuscript Defined as Poem

At the completion of the manuscript the footnotes concerned
her; would they extend too far, run into the next page,
become separated from their main material?

Would the hunter stalking the deer, lose sight of the hind
as it springs, running and leaping away? Would the parent
lose its child? The original work its meaning?

Down the long thought-avenues, turning this way and that—
what chance for the runaway? What chain to be linked? What
field enclosed? All, all is a matter of choice. Relinquish

your feral call; return to your pasture. Let the wild remain wild.
At night the signifiers bounced behind the stag's eyes
in the moon's hoary light, lost again as day rose. Rediscovered

then, in a moment's unspent time, taken hold of, the poem fastened
itself forever to your welcoming bosom, born of an unsprung,
unseeded process of generation, but fixed, at last, and bounded.