Deer Playground

This winter the deer are coming closer to the house than they ever have before.

Last summer we were amazed by how much wildlife we were seeing. Nothing major– no coyotes or foxes– but there just seemed to be a wider variety of everything: birds, rodents, bees and butterflies. We credit the prairie, of course, which is now more than 10 years old and has been expanded nearly every year.

Unlike last winter, this winter we’ve had snow pretty regularly, and long stretches of bitter cold. But I’m not sure if that is what has brought out the deer.

But they are here every night. And every morning, like looking for evidence of Santa’s sleigh, I look out to see what they’ve done, what ground they’ve cleared.

Steve has seen them twice. Once he went out on the patio about 8:30 p.m. and saw three deer under the oak tree, looking back at him, waiting patiently until lights out to come closer and graze.

Another night he woke up about 2 a.m. and looked out the window to see them digging through the snow to eat the grass underneath. The large patches of ground and myriad tracks certainly make one think of reindeer games.

Winter is such a silent time out here. In one of my online yoga programs, the instructor asks the student to listen. I was surprised by the depth of the silence in my room. I heard a bird, but it was on the video! Deer, too, though they are such large creatures, are mysteriously silent as they live alongside us.

Last week I was reading a book of poems by one of my old teachers, Jean Valentine, and I read these lines in a poem called “The One You Wanted to Be Is the One You Are”:
“Their breath like a tree’s breath. Their silence
like a deer’s silence.”

It reminded me of all the thinking I did last summer about “transpiration,” the way trees drink in water and breathe it out to form cumulus clouds. And I thought a while about the particular silence of deer. I wrote a summer poem… maybe a winter one is also required.

Transpiration

Their breath like a tree’s breath, their silence
like a deer’s silence.
Jean Valentine

This summer I learned about transpiration.
The trees puff out clouds, water
rising invisibly from their leaves

in transparent waves, so much water
from a single tree, so much water
from a tightly planted field of corn.

A shimmering rising of exhaling trees,
and we say: Oh my, the humidity!
and lick the salty rain from our lips.

The deer lie in their secret shade
or pick their way through the woods,
having their fill of new leaves.

They drink in the wet breath of trees,
they feast on cotton clouds, until dusk,
when they suddenly appear at pond’s edge.