Dear Friends,

At the end of this letter you will find a poem. I wrote this poem for me. I wrote it because I wished to capture an experience and/or a feeling and/or a sense of place, to fix in time with words something transitory. It is a doubling of attention. I go out there into the world and try to see it as it is, to open myself to what it may show me. Then, reflection and writing and paying attention again – perhaps paying attention to my paying attention – so that I might learn new things.1

I revised and reworked this poem for me, but also for you. Because sharing it here moves the poem outside of the realm of private self-expression and into the realm of communication. I want a poem that I ultimately share to sound a certain way, to conjure specific images, to spark an emotional charge. I take care to craft and hew the poem, but with the full realization that the process of revision could go on indefinitely, and that the decision to stop and share it is somewhat arbitrary, or a matter of abiding that old maxim: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or it’s a matter of impatience on my part. Good enough.

I’m not too concerned about perfect or good. I’m not a poet! (Is that a cop out? I do write poems, of course, but I have neither the focus nor the self-delusion to don the Poet badge.) Honestly, the important thing about these undisciplined, erratic poems I write and sometimes share is that they are this mechanism for paying attention. And for loving language. And for loving the world, as Mary Oliver so often instructs me. A sharpened poem is like a pinhole camera, projecting and reflecting new ways of seeing and experiencing all the things this world has to offer.

And so, a poem…

Because I think this creature knows things I do not
I stand still in pajamas on the grass,
stare through the grid of a box wire fence
to where frost whispers near-winter upon
the woody remains of goldenrod and aster.

The deer and I are held together
for an instant in the discovery of each other.
His whiskered head and young antlers are like
the radiant silk of bursting milkweed in this trampled field.

Me? – I live like I’m told.
I pick up fallen apples.
I maintain fences and gates.

The deer huffs and turns,
ripples pounds of muscle under taught skin.
I cherish the flash of wagging white tail
before he bounds, unhurried, into the woods
and out of my life.

Hoping you find a poem to love,

Jeremy