I blinked and
you were grown
winter sunrise
~Amy Borgman @ireneaddie.bsky.social
February 25, 2025
I go down to the
clearing pick a handful of
raspberries and eat.
zphx ~ July 8, 2013
The bright blue river.
I am struck by the bright blue of the river
(a deeper blue than the sky)
the fresh yellow green of the meadow
(coarse sedges just starting)
and a greener green next the river edge
(the green of the early rank river-grass).
These several colors
are as distinct and simple
as a child's painting.
H.D. Thoreau, May 4, 1860
Simple
~ R \aymond Carver
From Ultramarine
Random House, 1986
A break in the clouds. The blue
outline of the mountains.
Dark yellow of the fields.
Black river. What am I doing here,
lonely and filled with remorse?
I go on casually eating from the bowl
of raspberries. If I were dead,
I remind myself, I wouldn't
be eating them. It's not so simple.
It is that simple.
The Cows at Night
The moon was like a full cup tonight,
too heavy, and sank in the Misty’s
soon after dark, leaving for light
faint stars and the silver leaves
of milkweed beside the road,
gleaming before my car.
Yet I like driving at night
in summer and in Vermont:
the brown road through the mist
of mountain-dark, among farms
so quiet, and roadside willows
opening out where I saw
the cows. Always a shock
to think of them, those breathings
close to me in the great dark.
I stopped, taking my flashlight
to the pasture fence. They turned
to me where they lay, sad
and beautiful faces in the dark,
and I counted them–forty
near and far in the pasture,
turning to me, sad and beautiful
like girls very long ago
who were innocent, and sad
because they were innocent,
and beautiful because they were
sad. I switched off my light.
But I did not want to go,
not yet, nor knew what to do
if I should stay, for how
in that great darkness could I explain
anything, anything at all.
I stood by the fence. And then
very gently it began to rain.
Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957
~Mary Oliver
Once, in summer,
In the blueberries,
I fell asleep, and woke
When a deer stumbled against me.
I guess
She was so busy with her own happiness
She had grown careless
And was just wandering along
Listening
To the wind as she leaned down
To lip up the sweetnesss.
So there we were
With nothing between us
But a few leaves, and the wind’s
Glossy voice
Shouting instructions.
The deer
Backed away finally
And flung up her white tail
And went floating off toward the trees –
But the moment before she did that
Was so wide and so deep
It has lasted to this day;
I have only to think of her –
The flower of her amazement
And the stalled breath of her curiosity,
And even the damp touch of her solicitude
Before she took flight –
To be absent again from this world
And alive, again, in another,
For thirty years
sleepy and amazed,
Rising out of the rough weeds
Listening and looking.
Beautiful girl,
Where are you?
Midsummer
Two yearling deer
stood in heavy, falling mist
in the middle of
the road leading in-
to town, brown coat glistening
huge eyes open wide,
caught in the headlights
in the first yellowish smear
of coming daybreak
Twenty feet away.
I finally stopped the car
and sat still inside.
eyes locked together
in a curious searching
with those of the doe.
Minute by minute,
we were transfixed, motionless
each imagining
the other. And then
the sun peeled back the dark clouds
like a second skin,
And, in unison,
the deer stepped slowly forward
gently, cautiously
off the road, into
underbrush that flourishes
along the woods edge
and vanished in mist.
Dazed, I returned to my day,
to the work at hand.
And now, the hour late
in the morning, mist falling
again, I can still
feel my skin prickle
under those beautiful brown
doe-eyes searching me
like a lover's hand,
cautious, slowly exploring
something deep in me
I cannot touch or name.
Halfway down'
~ Chard deNiord, from “Interstate”
Halfway down: the sight of a doe,
through the trees in the meadow.
I stopped to stare at her staring at me.
The silence arced between us like a wire
in a current that equaled strangeness
over time, and since her stare was wild –
so charged with fear the moment froze
on the line of sky and field, man
and deer — she broke our stillness
in her flight from me. I stood alone
but double then as the man on the path
and the memory of the man she carried
with her beyond the meadow into
the next meadow and the meadow after
that where she returned my image
to the field of forgetting in which
I roamed like deer myself, remembering.
A HUNGER SO HONED
~ Tracy K Smith
Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,
Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh—
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.
I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,
All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn't wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state -
The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.
I thought of the animal's mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.
We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,
That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.
The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,
As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,
And we drove on, our own limbs,
Our need for one another
Greedy, weak.
surprise fawn
