Waiting for the deer

It’s far more satisfying to see them,

hunkered down on the woods path,

than to walk the path trying to spy

a patch of brown, a flicker of a tail,

the worn heels of horns sticking out

from the mix of branches.

Tonight I went to the river’s edge

to find another miracle, and

what I found was a locked garden gate,

a dog, unleashed, weaving between gravestones,

two school buses and the herringbone

flash of a falcon moving from a nearby tree

to the deeper part of the woods.

Even the sycamore tree who held

our worries and wishes has been chopped down.

The leaves are beginning to turn,

and the vast landscape of the northern shore

looked more like broccoli stapled to the earth

than anything spectacular. It all made

me think that miracles are wily

beasts able to chart their own arrival.

And tonight they are tending to someone else.

I am sitting where the nuns walk after dinner,

yet no one, this evening, has come

to enjoy the wilting light. It is just

an ordinary plastic picnic table.

a patio made with Home Depot molded stones.

A place of this world and not the other.

There once was a woman who loved the sound

of my feet crunching in the snow,

and tonight, I know she would have

heard the way the dry acorns shattered

under the weight of my steps.

I can see the way she would have smiled.

She is three miles from here, though, lost to me now.

Another is ninety-two miles away. And the last

who loved me because she knew I needed to be loved,

is resting in her bedroom seven states away.

How do I say “I love you” to the

one not yet on the path?

By walking it? By staring down into

the woods for anything familiar?

Do I hinge it to a word, just one,

seeing the way it shines inside out,

as if lit by the western light?

Or do I walk away? Knowing the deer

are grazing elsewhere and in time

they will come out, hungry for what

I can feed them from the palm of my hand.