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A Deer Cries Out (continued from preceding page)
I regularly walk my Beagle along the hollow’s gravel road. Bundled in a winter coat, at the promontory near the end of the road, before 8:00 AM, a black mountain lion, called a cougar by scientists, bounds quickly across the road about 75 feet in front of me. It is much bigger than my dog, completely black, long backed, with a long tail. I am excited at this discovery. The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources claims there are no mountain lions in the state, but everyone here I spoke to says as matter
of fact there are lions here. They have been caught on Pennsylvania game cameras. As they have home ranges as large as 10 miles square, it’s probable they have followed the forests across the artificial state boundary. I post news of the lion on a Facebook group, get agreement that presence of a mountain lion is possible. A few older residents claim to have seen one also.
A month later, dog walking again, toward the last house on the route, I see a large black cat sitting on a porch. The cat has a collar, from a distance, not a game tracking collar. My wild black panther is a do- mestic pet, though I have not seen it again. My wild- life infatuation crashes.
Now it is spring. A cool spring. Dawn on the farm, 25°f. Day holds its breath. I read tanka from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. I hear muffled rustling in the forest
as fallen leaves disintegrate into dust, like worn out ceremonial robes and nativity swaddling. Forest mast hides moles and mice and yet unnamed species of beetles and bugs digesting dead things. So much of classical Japanese court poetry is about love and the deception love creates, as in American pop music.
Like a tendril | of the Ausakaya vine | I long to be entwined | with you — and no one | would be any the wiser.
(Fujiwara no Sadakata, Minister of the Right, 873–932)
Equally the poetry concerns absence and death, often treated through symbolism.
I am lost in thought | about this world our — inescap- able state. | Deep in the hills | a deer cries out.
(Toshinari, Private Secretary to the Emperor, 1114– 1204)
I am a secret to myself. To live is to reveal myself to me. Sartre says, emotions confirm themselves. If you are fearful, your fear finds fearfulness in the world. If you are angry, your anger identifies something to be angry about. To observe the world is to see, as in a movie or a novel, your emotional drama unfold. Some revealings are secrets—suppressed memories
of events; other revealings are bumpings into struc- tures in the world. My anxieties become searchlights that, waved randomly into the dark of the unknown, cast shadows of secrets I don’t want to know, and you probably wouldn’t want to know, either.
September 19, 1961, Barney and Betty Hill, an inter- racial married couple, late at night, drive US Route
3, south through the mountains of New Hampshire, Franconia Notch to Ashland. As their journey occurs in towns and rural areas where I grew up, I natu- rally am interested in it. I write my first professional review of a book about the UFO hysteria. After pass- ing through Franconia Notch, the Hills believe and testify, they are abducted by aliens from a strange flying aircraft, a plane “that was a plane but was
not a plane”. The nation is fascinated by the first US alien abduction story, a “close encounter of the fourth kind.”.
Arriving home, the Hills realize seven hours of the previous day are missing from their lives. They soon recall that during those hours nonhuman aliens take them into their craft, experiment on them, and sexu- ally probe them. National conventions of individuals with similar alien abductions are held frequently before the hysteria calms down.
Psychoanalytic theory interprets alien abduction experiences as activation of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. These traumatic memories are not consciously available to the victims. Given ap- propriate triggers, victims project their traumatizing experiences of sexual abuse onto the alien abduction. As a template, alien abduction provides a vocabulary, dialogue, and narrative structure to discuss, without realizing so, their sexual abuse. This hypothesis is Freudian, but the theory of secret emotion struc- turing perception to reveal itself in disguised form, maps on my encounters, during stressful, anxious chapters of my life, of alligator, bear, dying fawn, and black panther. To return to the question, what secret do my misapprehensions reveal?
Note: A Gap in the Clouds. A new translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu. Translated, with an introduction, by James Hadley & Nell Regan (Dublin, Ireland: Dedalus Press, 2021).
Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He and his wife live and farm in West Virginia. He writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. As an imag- ist poet, he expresses experiences and moods in concrete descrip- tions in haiku, lyrical poetry storytelling, audio poetry, and in filmic interpretation. He has published widely in poetry journals. He was
a finalist in Cleaver Magazine 40th Anniversary Flash Fiction Contest.
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