Winter Notes for a Poem:

I am watching the snow for deer and fox, for animals that show up against it, that show up because of it, drawn from their shadowy exclusiveness into the community of hunger. Here in the house, looking out the window, I am more isolated than they are. I think about thinking about watching them, another removal, headed toward the printed page. They walk on our side of the creek and up the steep, wooded hill on the other side.  My watching is like computer pornography, I wrote in my notes. They don’t want to be observed in their wildness, is what I was thinking, in their bare skin. They don’t want to be watched at all. The blue sky is close and pale, I wrote, playing off the snow. The snow keeps pulling back. Tonight is the Superbowl,  the Interstate Highway of rutting, I wrote. As serious as sex, and as physical, all that gripping and groping, an honest ferocity you can’t help but respond to even if you’d prefer watching for deer. The old human terror, the lightning in the muscles., the tacitly accepted edginess.It’s the provisional, the edginess that’s so appealing, so persuasive. “When the revolution comes, the crowds, we’ll have to put the deer somewhere,” I wrote. Where did that come from, the overthrow of the culture, out of this snow, these deer? “The fence will be opened, and there will be no sign of history, of persuasion,” I wrote. “It will be the Superbowl of being, one secret life against another.” Oh, that’s where it came from, one secret life pitted against another. Mine and the deer’s. Now I’m bitter, dark: “The landscape will be made of Supersized Cokes, a lethargy, a confusion,” I wrote. “There will be rats looking for inclusion.” This is about America, which is much on my mind. Then I wrote in my notes, “What is this about?” mostly to keep myself moving. This line got tangled with a dream I’d recently had about being in bed with a gorgeous stranger. “It was all innocent, which it wasn’t.” That was the first line of the poem. It was the deer. It was America pretending to be the deer, innocent, the last best hope. There was a “you” in the poem, because I find I am not alone, after all, in this. I have dragged someone into it.I have turned to these notes in desperation, looking for a subject, a place to start. It is the football that brought in the other person, the “you.” It is my husband, or all of us, turning inward on such a day, on all these days of despair and winter. I was thinking about escape, escape into books, behind windows.There was a lot more. There was an Australian Syrah, a nightly list of the dead on TV, this is about my anger, my tendency to withdraw in my rage, not knowing what to do. My watching deer on the snow.