A Poem

Throughout my life there seem to be many recurring symbols, all of which I believe to be of some sort of significance. One of these symbols that tends to appear over and over again is that of a deer, specifically, a buck. Thinking back to my earliest encounters with this symbol, I am reminded of the White Stag in the last chapter of C. S. Lewis' 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.' This is one of the books I grew up on, and one of the earliest I read on my own. Ever before I could read, my mother read it to me. Though I've read the passage over and over, the White Stag, uncatchable and unattainable, never fails to enchant my imagination, leading the now-adult characters deep into the woods, past the forgotten lamp post, and once again into the wardrobe of their youth.

Growing up, I remember how exciting it was when I first moved to Kentucky to see deer grazing in fields by the side of the road. In California we didn't have deer. In my high school years I lived on something of a farm with my family where every morning before school we would see a group of deer, mostly does and fawns, moving about in the smoke-gray morning fog. Even then, it was unusual to see a buck.

Most recently, I was reading a passage from Faulkner's "The Bear" about Sam Fathers, the half-negro, half-indian man of the wildrness teaching young Isaac McCaslin how to shoot a rifle. Faulkner's description of the deer, moving about in the morning light just before Ike pulls the trigger, is among the most beautiful and most precisely executed passages in Modern literature. It inspired me to put this mysterious recurring symbol into verse, something I've been wanting to do for some time.

HART

Watching from my bedroom window this morning,
I saw, elongated, in a blur of silver smoke,
passing between the trunks of reddening trees,
in the clean gray of dawn, a buck,
who vanished against the sun,
clearing the planks of a white-board fence.

This poem is among the best I've written. Not simply for its brevity or its precision, but for its dynamic. So much is going on in this one, rather long sentence. The speaker watching from the window, the sun rising, the deer moving through the trees and disappearing against the rising sun. All of this takes place in just a few short seconds. I did everything I could to slow the moment down. Commas, line breaks, the descriptive build up before the subjet, "a buck," all of this is done to suspend the reader in this one, ephemeral moment in time. And just as the deer vanishes against the sun, the moment is gone.