Alfred Nicole 

Acteon, After 

No harm has come to me; I am another, not myself.
I might have leapt and fled among the trees. I did as well
by keeping still. The fleetest deer cannot outrun its senses.
Or how should I unsee what I had seen, or gather in
what seeing had drawn out from me? Myself went out from me.
Now I am the blurred thrum of the flight of startled wings,
the tremor of a single leaf, the seam of parted air.
At once bereft and blessed with more than everything I had—
to see as in a dream the one I dared not dream to see—
if I were but the shadow of a reed I would be glad