Three deer on the nearby hill and maybe more
on the farby hill and probably every hill
in this place of hills had deer on it
eating the gray-green grass of December
in the early light. How I decide
to get out of bed these days is deer.
If I look out my window and see them
I know it’s time to feed my feet
to the mouths of my jeans
and when I told my wife the deer
are my new clock she said they won’t fit
on the mantle. The clock of three deer
watched me walk down the drive
to get the paper but I was alone
at the bottom of the hill when I read
there were twenty thousand dead
in Iran from a quake. Yesterday
it was twelve thousand dead
and the day before ten thousand dead
and I sensed a pattern. In the cold
sensed a pattern, with mittens on
sensed a pattern and coming back
into view of the clock of three deer
I waved and shouted I have sensed a pattern.
Of course they were intuitively aware
of this pattern, that everything
which eats also hunts and everything
that hunts is also eaten, including
the buckling Earth, including my mittens
and the mist rising from my mouth, the white
husk of breath, of course they ran
from my voice into woods
from which I later heard the pop
of shotguns, which sound soft
from afar like champagne being opened
but loud from near like flesh being opened.
It was just after the song of champagne
began that I thought, right now, this instant,
precisely as I put the corner of this toast
into my mouth, a boy, a girl sits on the rubble
of his former roof, her one time wall
and holds the hand of his buried mother,
the foot of her crushed father, not
because I am sentimental did I think this
though I am but because twenty thousand dead
means every sorrow we can imagine
and every sorrow we can’t has occurred.
And deer are the best clocks because time
is twitchy, is a nervous thing
running away from us into woods,
into its own death and I don’t like
wrist watches, have never worn one,
don’t like cuckoos, all birds should fly,
don’t like Big Ben because people
were tortured in that tower, time
is politics of the worst sort,
is who controls the numbers
and it isn’t me, is never you
and just three days ago the clock
of the ground struck the hour
of twenty thousand deaths and tomorrow
the paper will say otherwise, will say more
and if I look into the brown eyes
of deer there is no time, no feeling
except peace, which isn’t real but neither
I sometimes hope are we.
