this in which

Camille Guthrie:

   "Last fall, a neighbor shot a doe in my front yard. I heard the gunshot, saw the doe stagger, limping and bewildered, out of the copse and race with her twins in a confused panic into the woods. I was shocked, although I had cursed the same deer for eating the last of the summer’s cherry tomatoes. This is certainly fodder for a poem, right?

   "There’s no poem there for me. No reach from the beauty of the scene; the explosion of the hunter; the death of the mother; the death of a human mother; to lots of pathos; then a return to beauty of the scene—the post-Romantic boomerang. . . .

   "Watch out for sentimentality. Predatory personification, too. And men with guns."

° ° °

George Oppen:

Psalm

Veritas sequitur ...

In the small beauty of the forest

The wild deer bedding down—

That they are there!

                              Their eyes

Effortless, the soft lips

Nuzzle and the alien small teeth

Tear at the grass

                              The roots of it

Dangle from their mouths

Scattering earth in the strange woods.

They who are there.

                              Their paths

Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them

Hang in the distances

Of sun

                              The small nouns

Crying faith

In this in which the wild deer   

Startle, and stare out.