'Halfway Down' - a poem by Chard Deniord
Halfway down: the sight of a doe
through the trees in the meadow.
I stopped to stare at her staring at me.
The silence arced between us like a wire
in a current that equaled strangeness
over time, and since her stare was wild —
so charged with fear the moment froze
on the line of sky and field, man
and deer — she broke our stillness
in her flight from me. I stood alone
but double then as the man on the path
and the memory of the man she carried
with her beyond the meadow into
the next meadow and the meadow after
that where she returned my image
to the field of her forgetting in which
I roamed like a deer myself, remembering.
Oct 24, 2015
Oct 24, 2015 at 7:31 AM UTC
'Halfway Down' - a poem by Chard Deniord
Halfway down: the sight of a doe
through the trees in the meadow.
I stopped to stare at her staring at me.
The silence arced between us like a wire
in a current that equaled strangeness
over time, and since her stare was wild —
so charged with fear the moment froze
on the line of sky and field, man
and deer — she broke our stillness
in her flight from me. I stood alone
but double then as the man on the path
and the memory of the man she carried
with her beyond the meadow into
the next meadow and the meadow after
that where she returned my image
to the field of her forgetting in which
I roamed like a deer myself, remembering.
Poet Laureate of Vermont
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