It was the deer. Or the raccoon lumbering away
from the feeder. It was America, pretending to be
innocent. I wanted to show you the deer because
we like to point out the wildness on our land,
as if the animals chose us from among contenders
for our purity of soul. The red foxes especially, the shier
the better, to show how far we are from McDonalds,
from Hummers. I wanted you to count the deer
with me, to agree that we love the world, the one
that can’t be bought.
Some days the sun disguises things.
What’s missing out there burns in our eyes.
We rant about politics. We feel like survivors
from a dangerous life. We enter books, looking not
for foxes but for accurate punctuation, a good phrase.
We want to be part of something lovely. We love
the idea of deer—remember when there were twelve
roaming along the creek-bank in the snow? Maybe not
in snow. The snow stands for the page, how far
they have to travel to get here, how we can’t
turn them away no matter what our hearts
are like, because of their alertness. We need them
for an alarm, for the terrible unnatural strangers.
The kids smoking outside the mall on a school day
are like those deer. They have muscles they might use
at any minute. They’re perfectly made for escape.
Meanwhile, we live with these windows,
this deck, and the wandering of animals.
We watch TV. It’s ridiculous the way we sit here,
the way we talk, as if possibilities for relieving the poor,
stopping the war, were public, waiting, longing
to be enacted. Tails go up like flags. Under the tails,
the fierce smell, a dignity. Who knows what to do
when everything keeps so far from us?