Curiosity 90: Poetry (Deer)

This weekend I gave myself the gift of a poetry workshop with a poet I admire, Mark Doty (whom I've written about many times here), and his guest, Marie Howe, whom I've also quoted, twice: once here, with a poem about her brother John, who died of AIDS (a poem I first encountered, I now realize, in another workshop with Mark); and again here. For the second one, called "One Day"—as in "one day, all this will be over"—she described its inception, at a poetry reading by Stanley Kunitz. And so yet another coincidence: it was at that event that he read for the very first time his beautiful poem "Touch Me"—which I presented here, too, just a couple of months ago, with its own little story. It all keeps swirling around in one big beautiful isness, this poetry stuff.

Anyway, here are a few poems (the first two came up at the workshop), all featuring, in one way or another, deer:

Psalm

by George Oppen

Veritas sequitur...  

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down—

That they are there!

       Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass

       The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.

       Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun

       The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out. 

 

Rooms

by Nancy Willard

All winter the rooms of the forest stand empty.
Now light lives there, and comes and goes as she likes.
She has sold her furniture, which no one remembers.
The dogwoods rearrange their ivory bowls on the air,
and clouds of leaves return to nest in the rafters.
The deer follow the stream from one room to the next.
The stream talks, and its talking scours the stones.
The skin of the river is cut into many small hills,
blond needles fall thick as hair under the pines,
where the comet that so many saw hang over the city
sailed each night in the still pond on the farm
yet left not a single track on its heavenly shore.
The mountains grow brighter and brighter – what can
        be in them?

Why do you knock, when you yourself are the door?

 

The Deer

by Mary Oliver

You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t

the owned, tilled earth of today
but the past.
I did not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind’s eye –
there they are, in the long grass,
like two sisters.

This is the earnest work. Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it –
to look around and love

the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don’t do this

I feel the terror of idleness,
like a red thirst.
Death isn’t just an idea.

When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill. 

 

And yes, I do still intend to get to 100, meaningless though that number is at this point!