Intersect

April 9 2014

She was like a racehorse

without the sweat-soaked sleekness

single-minded breeding,

the crouching rider, in his jewelled silks

squeezing speed.

The same barrel chest.

The same taut tendons,

on legs that seem too thin

flat-out stretched.

Nose reaching, nostrils flared

for the other side of the road.

A the end of a hard winter

her coat was mousy dull,

ragged patches of fur

in matted tufts.

From this side

I could see one big brown eye

dilated wide.

Which I took for fear

but may have been concentration,

a creature of prey

who calmly accepts

her fate.

Here, in fall and spring

the deer are rampant.

The few who achieve old age

must have learned to wait

for passing cars.

The rest spook,

leaping into the road

in a blind-side instant;

creatures of flight,

of startle, and chase.

Our unlikely intersection

in time and space,

me braking hard

as she barely grazed

the smoothly sculpted steel.

Because in the series of contingencies

that is life

it's always a fraction of inches

the split-second difference.

Now, I imagine her grazing

in some secluded wood,

pawing at crusted snow

for newly greening grass.

In the quiet stillness

hair-trigger alert.

And I am back at my desk

scrabbling for words.

Thinking of all the chances

taken for granted

in long eventful lives.

Another poem about contingency, something I’ve written about in other poems with the metaphor of frail or gossamer threads. And another deer poem, which have become almost as tiresome as the dog ones! But in what’s actually a mostly uneventful life not worthy of autobiography, I take what’s given.