What the Deer Keeps

The deer does not explain herself.
She steps from the trees
with the stillness of something
that has never needed permission
to belong here.

The field receives her
without applause.
The wind touches her
as it touches the grass,
the thistle,
the low bent weed near the fence.

Nothing in her asks
to be admired.
Nothing in her strains
to become more
than what the earth
has already made.

She listens
with her whole body.

An ear turned slightly.
A pause held clean as water.
A dark eye gathering the edge
of every sound.
She knows the hour
by light on the ground.
Knows the air
by what it carries.

There is no false distance in her.
No life of sealed rooms.
No forgetting of weather.
She does not have to return
to the world.
She never left it.

I watch from where humans stand now
half-hidden behind habit,
surrounded by our cleverness,
our noise,
our bright relentless inventions.

And still
when she lifts her head,
something ancient in me
falls quiet.

Not fear.
Not envy exactly.
Something closer to grief
and recognition.

Because she keeps
what we misplaced.

The old listening.
The body’s trust.
The unbroken thread
between creature and place.

She keeps the knowledge
that dusk is not an ending
but a change in language.
That shadows are not empty.
That the earth speaks first
through silence.

Then she moves.

No performance.
No farewell.
Only the soft crossing
back into brush and dim gold
as though the world
has folded her in again.

And I am left
with the ache of it.

Not only her beauty
but her nearness
to something we once knew
before we covered ourselves
in distance.

The deer keeps walking.
The field keeps breathing.
The trees keep their counsel.

And here I remain
trying to remember
how to belong
without taking,
how to listen
without naming,
how to stand inside the living world
as if I were still
a part of it.