UPDATE: Nora has finally seen the white stag! As have Jenniforensic and her mom, Patty, Carol and Chris. In addition, the Home-News Tribune has caught a photo of a piebald doe that is probably related. Click here for photo of the doe.

Suburban Legend

A wet September Monday:
Another late-night drive
Another REM song plays
And the White Stag of River Road
Eludes me once again.

Maybe he hides on Mondays:
Saves his leaf-twined antlers
His gleaming garnet eyes
His scent of Annwyn's old forests
For less prosaic nights.

It heartens me to know he's there:
His pulse beside the highway
Pounding even at this hour
An anchor felt to lands unknown
But dreamt and sung in silver.

Friends have seen him striding:
Seen him bless the traffic
Almost followed him forever
They have sighed and not regretted
The lives that turned them back.

by Nora
© 2003

(A few of us have seen the ghostly White Stag that haunts Johnson Park, Metlars Lane and River Road in Piscataway. I’d first heard about a white stag in the area years ago; a friend at work said that he had seen an adult stag, pure white,with a full rack running down Metlars Lane in Piscataway alongside the evening traffic. I’d never seen one until this year. As Norma and I were driving out of Johnson Park, we stopped to watch a doe with her faun come out of the woods. She was followed by a beautiful white stag, a young one. Carol and Chris saw him a few days later. Patrick tells us there was yet another one- grazing on the corporate lawns off of Route One south of the city. -ed)