986. Halfway Down - Chard Diniord

.

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.