And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

Inconveniently Themselves

351 Inconveniently Themselves I recognize all five of them— a doe, three fauns and a teen-age stag whose antlers-to-be are still just knobs. They’d traipsed across my yard all summer, nosing for apples or nipping my wife’s azaleas. I’d scare them off, but once I said, “Just wait a minute!” I rolled a fallen apple to the doe. She paused to size me up, then tongued the apple, bit, chomped and left some remnants for the fauns. The stag preferred his personal apple and ate it whole . . . Now, in absolute indifference to stalled traffic, they cross a four-lane road in single file at a stoplight. They take their time. Finally, one driver fires a staccato honk and makes them halt. The doe appears less startled than offended. She stares at half a block of drivers furious 352 and anxious to be anywhere but where they are. Her stance reminds them of a past when deer could roam and rollick here before there was a road, before the world was ruled by stoplights, clocks and cars, before what everyone calls everything existed . . . . Of course, the traffic wins at last but not before five deer, ancestral as gazelles and queued like players in a play within a play, have paused and posed and passed. ...