My father spoke little when we’d hide all day together
behind the blind, waiting for deer to come for
the buds, half-high above the creek.
For days, now, I’ve driven by places.
I drive with the radio off, and in the evenings
I sit at the edge of my bed without music.
It’s not on purpose, it’s always luck.
I suppose it’s the body, that it still remembers certain tricks; nod
discretely to itself, offer a knowing glance,
gesture with a finger, “wait.”
I move to the sliding door and from here
I scan fields through the tracts of stripped forest,
and then through that, another, and when
the light changes and lands on me,
I know a good hunter
will recognize the form; bare
as the tree in the centre of a field, I passed today,
and then like the deer that comes to me now,
balanced, in my mind, over the ice,
ears erect to the sound of nothing but glass opening
into the invisible river.