“The deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.”
—Jane Hirschfield, “Standing Deer”
And this is how it is when I see the two-point,
forty feet away, straight down the sidewalk,
poised and watchful. And because
it’s a blessing, I move to the other side of the road
in order not to spook him, to startle him out of
my sphere of awareness, because I want
the blessing to last, this vision of the unexpected
and its mysterious presence here in the summer
dusk, having crossed the barrier between
the mundane world I walk in and the wilderness
I tend to skirt. So I wait. And he waits.
It’s a moment of revelation with nothing in particular
revealed. When I left the house, the power
had gone out, the clocks stopped—but time
went on nonetheless. Time is relentless that way,
a blade sharpening itself against the whetstone
of our brief lives. One day, or a hundred years,
and then, once in a while, a vision. Not necessarily
grandiose or magnificent, but sometimes vulnerable,
with slender legs easily snapped.
I am reminded of willow withes and suppleness,
resilience, all those signals of youth, all
I’ve left behind, as the deer vanishes and I continue
walking toward the dark house waiting.
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